In Tuning Our Hearts to the Psalms, biblical scholars Michael J. Rhodes and Brent A. Strawn bring together scholarship and creative reflection from around the world to explore the Psalter on its own terms and in the living contexts of Christian worship today.
This volume calls scholars, pastors, and worship practitioners back to the Psalter as the church's one divinely inspired prayer and hymn book. Attentive to the Psalms' musical character and canonical authority, these essays listen closely to Scripture first meant to be sung and to shape the hearts and lives of God's people, showing how the Psalms can tune the hearts, worship, and witness of the church across cultures. The result is a resource that challenges assumptions, reorients interpretation, and equips readers to pursue a vision of worship that is rooted in both Scripture and their own heart languages and cultural forms.
What you'll find in Tuning Our Hearts to the Psalms:
- Global, multicultural scholarship from Psalms scholars, theologians, and practitioners across a wide range of cultural backgrounds
- Case studies that show what it looks like for the global church to center the Psalms in worship across Indigenous and diverse cultural contexts
- Engagement with the legacy of Christian worship and that equips readers to think critically about homogeneity in worship and the suppression of Indigenous expression
- Practical and pastoral ideas for turning to the Psalms as a primary resource for your own worshiping life and in your spheres of influence
- Links to selected audio and video recordings of music created as the outworking of the shared creative endeavor of scholars and leaders creating music that is faithful to the Psalter
Tuning Our Hearts to the Psalms will deepen your appreciation for the Psalter itself as well as for the diversity of ways God's people engage the Psalms. This book is an ideal textbook for courses in Old Testament, worship studies, Psalms and Wisdom literature, and intercultural or missional theology.
About the Contributors
This volume includes contributions from Luke Kaa-Morgan, Ellen F. Davis, Jill Firth, Federico G. Villanueva, Brian Fiu Kolia, Michael Mawson, Philip Church, Joel Love, Jay Mātengas, Denise Tims, Ray Totorewa, Te Hira and Anameka Paenga, Eugene Fuimaono, Tanya Lameta, Jonathan Robinson, Emma Stokes, Terry Wildman, W. H. Chong, G. Geoffrey Harper, Kit Barker, Michelle Navarrete, and Malcolm Gordon.
