In my “Music and Identity in the Americas” course, we spent time last week thinking about the role of music in religious practices, with a specific focus on how these contexts shape personal perceptions of identity and belonging. It is tricky territory for me, a musician and music scholar whose identity was shaped profoundly by a religious tradition he fully rejected as an adult. The hymns of the Lutheran Book of Worship tear at my heart, triggering long “resolved” trauma in that weird, comfortable way that sensory memory can do.