Psalms and the Transformation of Stress. Poetic-Communal Interpretation and the Family

Professor Sylva has written a major book in what Clifford Geertz terms "blurred genres." By that Geertz means a study that refuses to stay slotted in a specified scholarly discipline, but reaches across such distinctions, in order to face real and complex human issues. As biblical scholarship moves out of its more positivistic modes, it is able to make contact with human dimensions of the text that "objectivist" criticism had long precluded. In this book, Sylva with painstaking research and urbane articulation reflects upon how the Psalms touch fractured human conditions in healing ways. This is no surface interpreation of scripture for the sake of "an easy religious fix", and it is no "pop psychology", because the author has thought with great steadfastness and is informed on both sides of the interface. The power of his argument is in the detail of human stress and in the effective nuance of the poetry. For his interface he employs the intriguing term "theotherapy". I have no doubt that this book will become a major resource for bringing back together text and human reality that our recent interpretative past has rent asunder. Sylva invites us to a new conversation as we "blur" our safer points of reference. Walter Brueggemann Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary This book seeks to uncover the serious and deep ways in which the Psalms speak to the human situation. Few works that I know of have sought to bring the Psalms to bear on the stresses and strains, the functions and dysfunctions of the family as has been done here. Professor Sylva endeavors to show how the Psalms create a fundamental trust in God, a trust that moves out into all other relationships starting with the family. This is something that happened to me as a child and that I came to realize only much later. In this work, The Pslams are clearly not simply a springboard to say some things about family therapy. They are the heart of this book, and it is only as they are heard in detail that one then moves or is carried by them into a more secure family relationship. I hope very much that this work will enhance the reading and appropriation of the Psalms within the family as a source of family health and strength. Patrick D. Miller Professor of Old Testament Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary Dana Sylva is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Saint Francis Seminary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is the editor of "Reimaging the Death of the Lukan Jesus" (1990), and he has published articles on Old testament and New Testament exegesis.