Suffering, Soul Care, and Community, by Ann Ahrens
It was so good to have Ann as a student at SBTS and to include her writing in two of my books, A Skeptic’s Guide to Arts in the Church: Ruminations on Twenty Reservations and Apologetical Aesthetics. For the latter, she supplied an essay entitled “A Savior Set Apart: How Christ’s Use of the Biblical Laments Calls Believers into Empathetic Fellowship.” This new book Suffering, Soul Care, and Community—continues in that vein, and I was pleased to commend it.
As I've followed Ann Ahrens' writing over the last several years, I've found that lament passages are now jumping off the page for me. I'm very pleased that she's ministering similarly to others through this book. The seventeenth-century Bay Psalm congregants sang, 'Thy countenance away from us o wherefore dost thou hide?' I trust her scholarship will prompt fresh, biblical, hymnic expression in this vein for our own voices.