Listening In: Multicultural Reading of the Psalms

Stephen Breck Reid maintains that every reader of the biblical text views it through the lens of other contexts. That is to say, communal narratives, cultural myths and stories, and the reader's own experiences, influence what we bring to, and take away from, Scripture. Focusing on the Psalms--specifically what the Psalter has to say about what it means to be human--Reid demonstrates that many inadequate and harmful assumptions about the text, especially those drawn from the dominant culture, can be offset by readings from African American and Latino perspectives. Thus Reid draws on recent historical, critical, literary, and rhetorical scholarship of the Psalter, combined with an imaginative reading of African American, Latino, and other non-dominant cultural materials, to provide a compelling glimpse of a multicultural reading of Scripture.