Dangerous Songs: The Psalms and a Gloriously Disrupted Life

Dangerous Songs: The Psalms and a Gloriously Disrupted Life
Richard Bruxvoort Colligan
Broadleaf Books, 201 pages
Published April 21, 2026

The Psalms are prayers, poems and songs that express the full range of human emotions. I’ve said this numerous times while preaching or teaching, and I believe it. But I’ve never deeply felt it.

Dangerous Songs asserts this claim too, and through the skill of its author, Richard Bruxvoort Colligan, readers are invited to fully make the Psalms our own.

“The Psalms invite you to hear your life as a song in process,” he writes. Bruxvoort Colligan, a musician, songwriter and leader in spiritual formation, leans into his songwriting experience, offering lyrical reinterpretations of many psalms and describing the literary techniques in their musical art.

As a director of spiritual formation, he knows the Psalms’ power to shape our faith, so Dangerous Songs is more than an exercise in art appreciation. He invites us to simultaneously experience the artistry of the ancient language, even imagining ourselves in Jesus’ circle, singing and hearing the words, while also experiencing the psalms as “dialogue partners who discuss with us that which is timeless,” as we apply them to our own lives.

Dangerous Songs offers a unique framework that lends itself to teaching; he frames the psalms according to “three dimensions of human life about which the psalmists sing: thriving, desolation, and unknowing.” This, I am finding, is an excellent approach to the (coincidentally) three-week class I’ve committed to teaching on the psalms.

Churches seeking a resource for adult ed or pastors eager to explore the psalms in a sermon series could easily build upon this approach, perhaps incorporating the detailed (and free!) study guide provided on Bruxvoort Colligan’s website, to lighten the load and bring additional insights to the work. Individuals will also benefit from the study questions and the encouragement to journal or doodle after each chapter. As I read, I found myself wishing for a playlist to share in my classroom — that, too, is embedded within the study guide.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect is Bruxvoort Colligan’s ability to deliver solid biblical scholarship with dry humor. He’s deliberately funny, sneaking in bits of humor that make the Hebrew Bible accessible to non-academic audiences.

Bruxvoort Colligan has studied the Psalms extensively as part of his passion to write psalm-based songs for worship (he has written a song for all 150 psalms!). Through this work, he has teased out curiosities in the Hebrew, wondered about their authorship, and drawn on resources such as Howard Thurman and Walter Brueggemann. The songwriter’s academic work focused on grief, and he briefly alludes to his own trauma, which surely informed his understanding of “desolation.”  By gathering all of this up, Bruxvoort Colligan has written the book he was born to write, providing us with a book that is practical, formative, lyrical and experiential — kind of like the psalms.

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