Brueggmann’s Top 10 Blogs 0f 2023
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Church Anew is honored to share new and original blog posts by the Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann each week. Wondering what Brueggemann's most-read posts were in 2023? Check out this list of his insightful Biblical and prophetic wisdom as you start the new year!
Pathetic Imagination
February 21, 2023
Pathetic imagination is incapable of hosting an alternative world and remains quite satisfied to have its sphere of possibility circumscribed to the small world in front of us. Thus in the confines of pathetic imagination, the claims of prophetic imagination are outrageous and incredible.
The End of Imagination?
May 10, 2023
Imagination is the capacity to host a world other than the one that is in front of us. Such an act of hosting an alternative world is inherently subversive, as it serves to question and override the world in front of us that we too easily take as given.
Rescinding Absolutes
September 7, 2023
It turns out, through the repudiation of the doctrine by Pope Francis, that no “absolute” that stands against human dignity and human wellbeing is a sustainable absolute. All such claims are relative to time, place, circumstance, and vested interest.
We Count Our Days
April 12, 2023
Maybe, as the TV ad has it, “Age is simply a number.” But I think not. It is our best human way of marking our reliance on God’s grace and living it back to God in gratitude as best we can.
A Music-Making Counter-Community
July 19, 2023
The gathering envisioned in the Book of Revelation is not 'pie in the sky.' It is not the-end-of-the-world speculation. Rather, it is a script for an alternative here and now."
Recovering Rest, Recovering Humanity
March 8, 2023
It is amazing how a watering place or a village well can be a site for human communication, human community, human wellbeing and human restoration. That process of recovery and rehabilitation, regularly reiterated, lasted only “twenty minutes out of their day.” Those twenty minutes, however, was sufficient time to conjure an alternative life in an emancipated community.
The City as “Container”
Mrch 30, 2023
For the writer of the Book of Revelation, this promise is not in a never never land of another world; it refers to a new city that will displace the tired violent city of Babylon (Rome).
The Unending Work of Contradiction
February 28, 2023
Twice in the gospel narrative Jesus declares the ultimate either/or of his life and teaching: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
On Gerrymandered Texts
January 4, 2023
Such an accent on the power of God, moreover, has been a long-running seduction for the church, as we have imagined the power of God to be not unlike the worldly power of mighty empires and imperial rulers. Insofar as the church has been seduced in this regard, attentiveness to the “weakness of God” may be a deep and significant corrective.
The Slow Speed of Comfort
November 15, 2023
The summons of this mismatch must be, in some complex way, a summons away from scale and speed in order to recover our capacity for compassion and empathy, our capacity to pause amid our rush to mastery, and to respond with serious attentiveness that takes time.
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