Lovesongs & Reproaches: Passionate Conversations with God - Softcover

L. William Countryman is a biblical scholar, an Episcopal priest, and retired professor from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He is known for spirituality works such as Living on the Border of the Holy, Forgiven and Forgiving, and The Mystical Way of the Fourth Gospel. His reputation was established by his classic Dirt, Greed, & Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today.

"Bill Countryman has woven a tapestry in which poetry and theology and story-telling, celebration and lament flow together seemingly effortlessly. It makes compelling reading. Drawing us on with words that energize, and arresting images that will resonate like lectio in the heart and mind." --Esther de Waal, author of Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality

"Bill Countryman shows us yet again what all of the great poets have shown us: that serious, first-level theological utterance requires poetic force with all its elusive, confrontive power. Countryman voices the real world and insists that the God whom he addresses pay attention and enter into the hurt alongside the rest of us. Those on the receiving end of this rhetoric will receive, as well, the gifts of courage and freedom for their own faith. It matters that God listens, as Countryman relentlessly insists." --Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

"Love poems always reveal as much about the lover as they do about the beloved. Certainly, in this deeply passionate, brilliantly phrased suite of poems, everyone who ever loved the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will discover himself or herself. For me, however, there is more than that in this shining collection: these fifty poems are as complete and satisfying a record as I have yet read of my own love affair with Him." --Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why