Walter Brueggemann Column
Church Anew is honored to host Walter Brueggemann as our featured columnist. We look forward to sharing Walter’s work with church leaders and faithful people worldwide. May his powerful and reflective writings inspire, energize, guide, and comfort you.
Permission to Narrate… Again
...Jesus restored to full life those who had been dismissed, discounted, and discarded by an economy too busy to notice, an economy bolstered and legitimated by religious claims made for and by “better” people.
Permission to Narrate
The work is to narrate, and narrate again, the pain of the world, the injustice of society, and the prospect for relief and recovery.
Seasons of Bells and Chains
The practice of Christmas is not simply much bell ringing that echoes the goodness of God. The news is that God has heard the clanging of the chains of bondage and has moved against [it]…
On Utterance
Peacemaking requires the Lordly graciousness of God; it also insists on the daily work of adjudicating the neighborhood to assure that all may share in a common good that provides the necessities for a viable, secure life.
Trees as Beloved Life-Giving Creatures
We may take “trees” as representative of God’s good provision for the earth
In Our Abandonment
The good news entrusted to the church is that the God of the Gospel is indeed to us as an attentive receptive mother, as an attentive, receptive friend.
Living Outside the Lie
...it will be important that the church be engaged in that daily assault on denial, precisely because it is the truth, and only the truth, that can make us free.
Beyond a Fetal Position
Even when it feels like we're alone, God reminds us: you have allies, you have purpose, and you have work to do.
Calling a Different World Into Being
So imagine—a church of hope that gathers yet again to affirm the abundance, hospitality, forgiveness, and peace-making reality of God.
The Force of Id and Otherwise
The good news is that we are not and need not be propelled by the negating work of God, of Satan, of the devil, or the id.
Liberated From Shame
Without a capacity for embarrassment, every greedy selfish action is accepted as legitimate.
The Great Contest
It turns out that in “the water of baptism” the church has been entrusted with a mighty claim for the priority of community that resists and refuses the ideology of capitalist privatism.
What are the Ten Commandments?
We take a look back at Walter Brueggemann's thoughts on Biblical law and its place today, revisiting some of our favorite posts.
Don’t Vote for Kudzu!
One need not do more than point out the claim of Jotham that when good people default on public responsibility, kudzu-like exploitative alternatives occupy the public space.
When Sociology Disappears
It is a moment of great importance when it dawns on one that there are other worlds and that a different world is chooseable beyond the one we had taken for granted.There is something teasingly elusive about such singing; we are able to sing what we cannot say
Singing Faith Lyrical and Truthful
There is something teasingly elusive about such singing; we are able to sing what we cannot say
Always Means Never Meant
"... when the church recovers its own voice and its own nerve, the biblical text may continue to surge out of the past with a generative forcefulness into the present."
On The Role of Bishops
Walter Brueggemann writes on the church's lost duty to the poor, and how ecclesiastical leaders can help recover its most elemental mission.
The Production and Defeat of Poverty
Walter Brueggemann examines debt, hoarding, and the failure of our economy, and shows how Scripture may allow the creation of an alternative.
The Legacy of James C. Scott
Walter Brueggemann writes on the scholarship of late anthropologist James C. Scott, and how “the weapons of the weak” may be found in Scripture.