Don Saliers
Theologian Church Organist Teacher
"How we pray and worship is linked to how we live - to our desires, our attentiveness and our deepst hungers"
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WHO HE IS
For half a century, Don E. Saliers has argued a single stubborn idea: That the church's prayer is not the decoration of its belief but the place where belief is made.
Theologian, organist, and William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theology and Worship at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, he spent decades in Atlanta teaching students who arrived thinking liturgy was a schedule and left knowing it was a formation.
He is also a working musician. The organ bench, the choir rehearsal, and the hymnal committee are not sidelines to his scholarship; they are its laboratory. What he writes about worship, he has first had to play.
A life in movements
Ohio, hymnbooks, a Yale doctorate, and five decades of Atlanta Sundays
1937
1967
1974
1980s
2005
Today
Born in Ohio
Raised in a household where the church hymnal sat as close to hand as the family Bible and where singing was the first theology he learned.
Doctorate at Yale
Graduate study in theology carried him toward the question that would occupy a lifetime: What does the church actually believe when it prays?
Candler School of Theology
Joined the Emory University faculty in Atlanta, where he taught theology and worshp to generations of pastors, musicians, and scholars.
University Organist
Directed the Master of Sacred Music program and served as university organist, insisting that the practice of music and the study of doctrine belong in the same room.
A Song to Sing, A Life to Live
Wrote with his daughter Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls on music as a spiritual practice, tracing one conversation across the sanctuary and the concert hall.
Professor Emeritus
Continues to write, lecture, and play, still asking congregations to notice what their singing is teaching them.
1966 - 1972
Yale Divinity School
Assistant Professor of Theology and Worship at Yale Divinity School, reaching students to understand their worship experience is related to their theology.
Core Conviction
A lifetime of reflection on worship as shared participation, where spiritual truth finds its most profound expression in communal song and ritual.
Three convictions he keeps returning to
01
Prayer as first theology
What congregation sings and says on Sunday shapes what it believes on Tuesday. Saliers treats the liturgy as evidence, not illustration.
02
The honesty of lament
A church that cannot sing its grief has only half a vocabulary. He returns constantly to the psalms of lament as the truest test of worship.
03
Music as a way of knowing
Melody, meter, and breath are not delivery systems for text. They are their own form of understanding, learned in the body over years.
" A church that has lost its capacity to lament has also lost its ability to sing praise with integrity."
Scholarship, Song, and Sacred Practice
Liturgical Theology
Hymnody & Composition
Academic Scholarship
Exploring the historical, theological, and pastoral dimensions of Christian worship and ritual.
Crafting new hymns and musical settings that resonate with contemporary faith while honoring ancient traditions.
Decades of teaching and writing, fostering critical engagement with worship, music, and the arts in theological education.
Featured Works
Belief
"A Theological Commentary on the Bible "
"Psalms"
September 15, 2026
An exploration of prayer and poetry, examining how language and form give expression to the ineffable, drawing from classical and contemporary spiritual writers.
The life of prayer is a double journey into the reality of God and the depths of our common humanity. These pages attempt to show how such formation in a particular pattern of religious affections is theological and not merely "subjective" or experiential. To say we love God but without love of neighbor, or to speak of God without gratitude or pain over injustice and suffering is not to have understood how prayer, experience and theology are related.
Featured Videos
Introduction and Commentary
on Don Saliers' New Book
"Psalms as Lyrical Theology"
The three main points or core themes of the Book of Psalms are praise and worship, lament and honest emotion, and God's absolute sovereignty and kingship. These ancient prayers and songs cover the full range of human experience with God.
Don Saliers
Liturgical Theology, Sacred Music & Hymnody
© 2026 Don Saliers-Bridging deep liturgical theology with living musical practice across decades of scholarship.
Liturgical Resonance & Practiced Faith
An independent tribute site devoted to the work of theologian, organist, and teacher of worship.
Not an official publication of Emory University
