Catherine Petrany Bücher

The ancient practice of spiritual direction has caught the attention of many segments of the church in the last few decades, but congregations often struggle to identify how this practice can shape the ethos of their communities today. In this thought-provoking, practical book, Tran and Boyd help congregations take a significant step toward integrating spiritual direction into their personal and communal discernment processes. Any pastor or lay person would benefit greatly from exploring and implementing the Prayer Model and Spiritual Discovery Method described in this book.

The presence of didactic, wisdom-like passages in the Book of Psalms presents a puzzle because it suggests a non-liturgical origin and pedagogical aim distinct from the more dominant psalmic language of lament and praise. Catherine Petrany argues for a literary and theological approach to the question of wisdom's role in the psalms that accounts for its meaningful integration with these other kinds of discourse. The unique contextualization of wisdom motifs in the psalms creates a pedagogical platform unique to the book, one related to but distinct from the pedagogies of the biblical wisdom corpus. Human wisdom speech in the psalms points beyond the classroom to the congregation and asks its hearers to become speakers, that is, to enter into conversation with the divine.