As a consequence, I believe as a direct consequence of the durable faith of the congregation, we are now beneficiaries of a whole new wave of scholarship on laments in general and about the Book of Lamentations in particular. Of course the connections between the felt need of a particular communal culture and the directions of scholarship are never made explicit, and are mostly not acknowledged by scholars themselves. I believe nonetheless that critical study is led by the hungers of its constituency. It is as though a large body of scholars has implicitly understood that ours is now a culture
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