Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit
Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit

Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit

by Walter Brueggemann

5 Rank Score: 5.12 from 1 reviews, 0 featured collections, and 1 user libraries
Pages 97
Publisher Cascade Books
Published 2007
ISBN-13 9781556352836

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Originally published nearly a quarter of a century ago, this small book demonstrates Walter Brueggemann’s capacity to probe deeply into the heart of the Psalter, lifting up its theological dimensions and its capacity to address the human situation. The book is unchanged from its first edition as far as this reviewer can tell. A new preface has been added to the original, and both first and second prefaces serve to uncover aspects of Brueggemann’s perspective as he takes up the Psalms. These include his sense of what he calls the “Jewishness” of the Psalms, an emphasis on the dialogic character of the Psalms, a desire to move beyond genre to get at the particularity of the different psalms, and, at the end, a quiet resistance to the triumph of the technological in (theological) education at the expense of face-to-face conversation and dialogue, which Brueggemann believes is something we learn from the Psalms as necessary for the pedagogical experience. Brueggemann is convinced that the Psalms touch human experience deeply but that we often do not open ourselves sufficiently to see how they give voice to what most of us experience. Most of the psalms, he argues, belong to the rawness of life. Here, of course, he has in mind the large number of lament or complaint psalms, which do indeed comprise the largest single genre of psalms. [Full Review]