I very much wanted to love this book, but I found it to be more suggestive than well-argued. It reads more like an outline for a longer work. Brueggemann introduces ideas and points to places in scripture, but he doesn't present a compelling hermeneutic of the psalms. His main argument is that we need to pray the psalms with the rawness and openness with which they were written. He encourages readers not to skip, redact, or allegorize the psalms to make them more palatable. I wish he had spent more time discussing his idea of freeing our language to pray as the psalm poets prayed. Even more, I think his ideas about Christians in "Jewish" territory need much more clarification. He is aware of the pitfalls that making an argument like this are, but he never addresses them fully, or at least to my satisfaction. Overall, I'm glad I read this book, but it wasn't as good as I hoped it would be. ( )

Wow. Not to be read quickly, but prayerfully. ( )