Chanting the Psalms: A Practical Guide with Instructional CD

Description

Cynthia Bourgeault shows how chanting the Psalms - those 150 exquisite hymns of praise to God from the Bible - can become a meaningful form of meditation and prayer for laypeople, leading to contemplation, insight, and joy. In this book-with-CD, Cynthia Bourgeault shows how chanting the Psalms - those 150 exquisite hymns of praise to God from the Bible - can become a meaningful form of meditation and prayer for laypeople, leading to contemplation, insight, and joy. The mindfulness produced by chanting can be tapped into by anyone regardless of musical skill or theological sophistication, and it can be done in community as well as privately. In Chanting the Psalms, Bourgeault provides a history of Christian psalm chanting (also called "psalmody") and demonstrates how it relates to other chanting traditions. She also shows how chanting can fit into an existing practice of contemplation and prayer, deepening and enriching it. But she also teaches you how to do it- you can literally sing along with Cynthia on the accompanying CD as she and her friends demonstrate the basic techniques and easy melodies that anyone can learn to make psalmody a personal meditative practice.

* Cynthia Bourgeault is a priest of the Episcopal Church. She received her Ph.D. in medieval studies/musicology from the University of Pennysylvania in 1972. She is a singer, director of medieval dramas, and editor or author of several books. She has been singing the Psalms for more than twenty years with the Camaldolese Benedictines of Big Sur, California, as well as with the monks of St Benedict's Priory in Snowmass, Colorado. She writes a regular column for Beliefnet.com and gives lectures and workshops across the United States and Canada.

"Bourgeault will be a helpful guide to those who seek to find a viable daily Christian practice, while those who already have a daily discipline may find that her suggestions for chanting deepens and enlarges their experience."-Publishers Weekly, starred review "The best book I've seen on the theory and practice of Christian contemplative psalmody."-Thomas Keating, author of Open Mind, Open Heart and Finding Grace at the Center "Few books ever manage to both inform and enthrall in equal measure the way this one does. The whole world of Christian spirituality owes Cynthia Bourgeault an enormous debt of gratitude for having given us a classic."-Phyllis Tickle, compiler of the Divine Hours series "Cynthia Bourgeault, a skillful teacher, offers you all of the do-it-yourself instructions you need to thoroughly enjoy the sacred tradition of change and so step from time into the eternal Now."-Br. David Steindl-Rast, OSB, cofounder of gratefulness.org