Thursday, October 12, 2017

[The Book] I'm a nerd.

So, I've been sporadically doing tiny amounts of work on The Book.

I was working on the Psalms of lament section, and I ended up re-requesting 2 books I read back in 2015 but hadn't taken notes on -- Living Through Pain: Psalms and the Search for Wholeness by Kristin M. Swenson, 2005 (for the Psalms) and The Mystery We Celebrate, the Song We Sing: A Theology of Liturgical Music by Kathleen Harmon, 2008 (for the use of music in worship).

My chapter on psalms of lament also discusses African-American spirituals (Monica Coleman has commented that when Jesus on the cross cried out, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" from Psalm 22, he was singing a lament song of his people -- the Psalms were the songbook of his people, just like the spirituals were the songbook of African-American slaves) and I realized that I don't have much to work with about the usage of Psalms of lament as part of the songbook of a people like spirituals, so I ended up going through the library catalog tag on the Psalms, and I'm bummed that it's all white dudes (I've been on a pretty intent break from books by white dudes for about 2 years now), but I'm so excited to dive into these books: