I took my senior capstone course with Kim Johnson on the devotional lyric, and one of our earliest units was reading through all 150 Psalms in less than a week. It was mind-boggling for me. I had read pieces of Psalms, but never the whole set all at once. What struck me most was how contradictory they felt. How wide and various the range of emotions I found in them. And, in fact, the largest hunk (apparently scholars estimate almost one in three) were lament psalms, prayer po