The mirror of the soul - new book by Peter Halldorf

The Mirror of the Soul is the title of Peter Halldorf's newly published book, the third in the "triptych" that began with The Eighth Day and was followed by The Difficult Love . All three books have been published in the past year and are designed by Tomas Einarsson.

The Mirror of the Soul – a title inspired by the church father Athanasios of Alexandria – is a book about finding one's own voice in the Psalms. Peter Halldorf initially describes how the use of the Psalter grew in the early monastic movement and how a "psalter revival" swept through Christendom in the second half of the fourth century. But above all, the reader gets guidance on how the Psalms can be used in different life circumstances. In a comparison with JRR Tolkien, the author writes:

With their rich poetic language, the prayers of the Psalms, like Tolkien's great sagas, address timeless existential questions. The longing for meaning, the emptiness of wealth, the cry for justice, the need for stillness, the struggle for integrity, the struggle with grief, loneliness, mental suffering and the reality of death. All of this constitutes leitmotif in the psalms. In the intense testing of what it is to be human, the distance between ancient Jerusalem and our modern world shrinks.