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.
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.
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.
Sermon-Proof
Walter Brueggemann writes on how to make sermons penetrate to the heart of the listener and encourage them to be active and empowered agents of God.
Anticipating the Election
Walter Brueggemann writes on the intersection between politics and faith, and the values that the church must endorse in the coming election.
Out-Interpreting the Ten Commandments
Walter Brueggemann writes on Louisiana’s public exhibition of the Ten Commandments, and how we may interpret and reframe Biblical Law to better serve our marginalized neighbors.
Greed which is Idolatry
Walter Brueggemann examines how we may use the Bible to maintain generosity in the face of modern greed. Through loyalty to our community and the God of abundance we may resist the ideologies of scarcity and covetousness.
Cascade! Divine?
The text of Job 1:13-19 is part of a “folk tale” in the Book of Job that frames the poetry that follows. The “folk tale” gives us a glimpse of the governing power of the creator God which is concealed from Job. God is unnamed in these verses though verse 16 allows a conventional phrase, “the fire of God.” It is often noted that in the prologue and the epilogue of the Book of Job, God is called by the Israelite name, YHWH. That naming of YHWH anchors the Book of Job in the Israelite tradition, even though in the poetry Job God is not so identified. In any case, behind the narrative is the governing force and will of the creator God who makes covenant with Israel.
The Voice of the Victim
In this blog, Walter Bruggemann discusses an unlikely group of people who come together through music. He connects this to the book of revelation and the Roman Empire.
A Music-Making Counter-Community
In this blog, Walter Bruggemann discusses an unlikely group of people who come together through music. He connects this to the book of revelation and the Roman Empire.
