Remember when you were a kid and you had to make little “poems” where the first letters spelled out a word, like your own name? Here’s an example: Twible is a Winsome but Irritating Bible for Left-Leaning Evangelicals and others. This is called an acrostic poem. Throughout history, acrostics have been used for didactic purposes…

Since I began the Twible project, people have sometimes asked me what the hardest parts of the Bible are to tweet. I didn’t have an answer for them at that time, but now I do, and it’s an unexpected one: the Psalms of praise. The Psalter is rife with these cheery hymns: Praise him with…

In doing the Twible recently I’ve come across a whole genre that I like to call the “Wake Up, God, and Get the Hell Out of Bed” Psalms. These are the Psalms for when God feels impossibly far away at best and nonexistent at worst. These are the Psalms for when we are suffering. The…

What do we make of Psalm 88? We saw last week that the Psalms of lament are a beautiful, if misunderstood, part of the Psalter, and that they serve a clear spiritual purpose. I talked about how much I liked Walter Brueggemann’s explanation of the cathartic pattern of these Psalms: Kvetch. Kvetch. Kvetch. Receive assurance…

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