The Cry of the Soul

July 4, 1994
Allender ( The Wounded Heart ), professor and counselor at Colorado Christian University, and Longman ( How To Read the Psalms ), professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, have successfully combined their areas of expertise to produce an excellent piece of scholarship suitable equally for the layperson and the theologian. Using the Psalms and studying the emotions of anger, fear, envy, despair, contempt and shame, the authors lay out the thesis that ``Exploring God's ways in light of the darker emotions reveals that He uses silence, abandonment, and assault to win our hearts for His glory.'' But this book is not to be mistaken for a fix-it manual for our darker emotions. Quite the contrary. It is instead a focusing tool for the consideration of what emotions reveal about how people deal with their relationship with God and with the pursuit of God as a ``Person to be praised'' rather than as some subordinate ``Servant of our healing.''