Welcome to the "new psalms"! If you are a regular to devotional reading, you already have a steady diet of inspirational material to keep your spirits challenged. If you are an honest and broad Scripture reader, you know of readings that are less than pleasant or just plain hard to read (and therefore mostly avoided). That goes for personal devotions and congregational reading. Some of them just do not sound nice!

The "old psalms" have these pockets of pedantry, even spewing out occasional curses, "go get 'ems," whines of self-pity, and burn-the-house-down epithets. These we almost never read. Yet we insist on a full reading of all the scriptures to have "real" conversations with God. Here you have them all in today's language, set in today's current flow of life--if you dare read them!