Professor Sylva has written a major book in what Clifford Geertz terms blurred genres. By that Geertz means a study that refuses to stay slotted in a specified scholarly discipline but reaches across such distinctions in order to face real and complex human issues. As biblical scholarship moves out of its more positivistic modes it is able to make contact with human dimensions of the text that objectivite criticism had long precluded. In this book Sylva with painstaking research and urbane articulation reflects upon how the Psalms touch fractures human conditions in healing ways. This is no surface interpretation of scripture for the sake of an easy religious fix and it is no 'pop psychology' because the author has thought with great steadfastness and is informed on both sides of the interface.