Overview

In the tumultuous spirit of the American South, A Carolina Psalter offers an outspoken conversation with King David's Psalms, great outcries to a personal God. The Psalms, as a transformational work, sing out in the confident voice of a people unafraid to address the deity almost as an equal, and in some cases, as a friend. The poems in A Carolina Psalter address the God of the Psalms with questioning, irreverence, and occasional confrontation as we move into new understandings of Spirit. If we wish, we can experience the Psalms, indeed all the Bible, as living poetry, its metaphors breathing vibrant new life into our souls. Tony Scully's poems challenge what he calls ""the war God of tradition,"" often questioning whether that God, so often on the front lines of revenge and destroying one's enemies, if not altogether absent during periods of loss and disaster, can possibly be God at all. His poems, although reflecting current thought and practice concerning the omnipresence of Spirit, spring from a well-founded history of believers, indeed, from the Bible itself, acknowledging the divine presence within. They assert the authority of the individual voice in a search for a God beyond accepted boundaries and definitions.

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9781725251410

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Reviews

A writer as deeply attuned to the Spirit's whisperings as he is to a culture's shiftings, Tony Scully, with his A Carolina Psalter, has made the ascent to the Psalms, one of the pinnacles of Judaic-Christian spirituality, more accessible, pertinent, and poignant than ever before. --Drew Casper, professor of American film, School of the Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California Tony Scully's A Carolina Psalter is provocative and prophetic, reflecting the essence of good theology: humility, a keen awareness of the naked human condition, social consciousness, the contradictions of existence, and, above all, hope. --Richard Brown, director, University of South Carolina Press Tony Scully's poems are the best kind of theology, that which seeks the Presence in honest response to the ambiguity of our experience. The poems engage the range and complexity of the Psalms in a dialogue marked by exceptional wit and insight. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. --William F. Summers, Presbyterian minister, Daniel Island, South Carolina The Psalms are alive and well in Tony Scully's A Carolina Psalter. . . . With humanity and humor and poetic brilliance, Tony translates this ancient immediacy into the vibrant and colloquial language of the twenty-first century that anyone can relate to, and delight in! --Nina Von Eckardt, artist in residence, Mount Bethel, Pennsylvania

A writer as deeply attuned to the Spirit's whisperings as he is to a culture's shiftings, Tony Scully, with his A Carolina Psalter, has made the ascent to the Psalms, one of the pinnacles of Judaic-Christian spirituality, more accessible, pertinent, and poignant than ever before. --Drew Casper, professor of American film, School of the Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California Tony Scully's A Carolina Psalter is provocative and prophetic, reflecting the essence of good theology: humility, a keen awareness of the naked human condition, social consciousness, the contradictions of existence, and, above all, hope. --Richard Brown, director, University of South Carolina Press Tony Scully's poems are the best kind of theology, that which seeks the Presence in honest response to the ambiguity of our experience. The poems engage the range and complexity of the Psalms in a dialogue marked by exceptional wit and insight. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. --William F. Summers, Presbyterian minister, Daniel Island, South Carolina The Psalms are alive and well in Tony Scully's A Carolina Psalter. . . . With humanity and humor and poetic brilliance, Tony translates this ancient immediacy into the vibrant and colloquial language of the twenty-first century that anyone can relate to, and delight in! --Nina Von Eckardt, artist in residence, Mount Bethel, Pennsylvania

Author Information

In a brilliant creative life, Tony Scully has been a Broadway playwright, a Jesuit, and mayor of a Southern city. A graduate of Boston College and Yale School of Drama, he was a deacon for the Reverend William Sloane Coffin. At the Woodstock Center for Religion and Worship he pursued liturgical reform. In Hollywood, he was a writer and consultant. He has taught painting, worked in street theater, and these days seeks to nurture the individual voice.

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