Psalms in Our Lamentable World

Where are worshipers in Christian communities to go with their experiences and observations of violence, injustice, and other forms of suffering? Historically, a central source of realistic faith-based responses to tragedy has been the Psalter, broadly defined as a set of biblical psalms arranged by date to be individually and collectively read, sung, and prayed. Recent scholarship on psalms has focused on lament and complaint, and questions regarding the presence of trauma and violence in religious traditions have shown such psalms to be particularly relevant to contemporary culture. This article examines three “psalms of lament,” Psalms 13, 42/43, and 88, discussing their implications for communal acts of worship, the development of critical theological skills in worshipers, and neglected dimensions of liturgical theological work. It argues that psalms of lament and protest, used liturgically, can enhance a congregation’s practices of truth telling, integrating life events with expressions of faith, and situating individual and communal experiences of suffering within the context of church history. Issues affecting the “performance practice” of liturgical psalms are also addressed, such as problematic content in imprecatory psalms (i.e., Psalm 137), discrepancies in the musical settings of lament and praise psalms, and styles of prayer and scripture engagement with or without the influence of lament psalms

Collegeville Connections: Spirituality, Song, and Social Justice

Please join Don Saliers (Theologian-in-Residence at Candler School of Theology at Emory University) and Emily Saliers (a musician who is one half of the folk duo Indigo Girls) for a lively conversation about faith, music, and their intersections, composing songs of justice, and their time spent in-residence as a family at the Collegeville Institute

What Eye Has Not Seen Nor Ear Heard: Christian Worship as Eschatalogical Art

Cook Lecture by Don Saliers, March 18, 2009. Digital audio recording (mp3). Duration: 1 hour, 7 minutes, 13 seconds