Taking its title from the angel's instruction to John in the Book of Revelation: 'Take it and eat it; it will be bitter in your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.'

Continuing Peterson's major evaluation of contemporary Christian spirituality, Eat This Book focuses on spiritual reading and discusses the challenges and benefits of how we engage with Scripture today.

The product of Peterson's many years' experience as both pastor and professor of the highest calibre, this series combines first-class scholarship and genuine, lived application. Beautifully written, it presents a fresh and urgent evaluation of contemporary Christian spirituality.

'St. John walks up to the angel and says, 'Give me the book.' writes Peterson. 'The angel hands it over, 'Here it is; eat the book.' And John does. He eats the book - not just reads it - he got it into his nerve endings, his reflexes, his imagination. The book he ate was Holy Scripture.'

'There is only one way of reading that is congruent with our Holy Scriptures, writing that trusts in the power of words to penetrate our lives and create truth and beauty and goodness. 'Spiritual reading', reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness and love and wisdom.'

Eat This Book encourages the art of reading the Bible so that it becomes a text for living and growing, not just thinking or behaving, and recasts the ancient discipline of lectio divina - spiritual reading - for a postmodern culture.

As with other books in the series: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Eat This Book is written for both academic and serious lay audiences. Challenging but rewarding, it combines first-rate scholarship with illustrations drawn from raw human experience.