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.
A Prayer for Elections and Democracy
In the wake of this moment in our shared democratic experiment,
we may hope and expect positive response from all of our people,
with affirmation for poor people alongside rich folk,
with glad acknowledgement of men and women and free gender delineations,
with full participation by the vulnerable and a refusal of their dismissal or disposal.
Dig, Baby, Dig!
Indeed for modern day leaders “drill, baby drill” becomes the solution to all economic problems. The community gathered around them, moreover, is simply a replay of the old exhibitionist effort of the ancient regimes that exuded hubris, recognizing no restraints.
Insatiable!
Because we know about trust in the endless, generous abundance of the creator, we are able to practice abundance in the neighborhood, and so generate wellbeing for our neighbors who themselves may lack sufficient resources.
Rewriting History
There can be little doubt that when we learn to reread the Bible, we will inescapably learn to read our own national history with more discerning eyes in a way that invites us to think again about our current national role in the world.
In the Face of Nihilism
Thus I judge that the pastors, preachers, and teachers of the church have a distinct possibility and wondrous opportunity to articulate a world other than the one subject to the force of the Nihil.
Labor: Organized or Otherwise
For much too long, the church has made wellbeing (salvation!) a personal, individualistic subject. But of course the truth is quite otherwise.
Speaking Alternatively
The speech writer had it right; we are on our own in speaking, except for images, metaphors, traditions, and familiar cadences.
No Safe Place
It is exactly that attentiveness and restorative work [of Christ] to which the church is summoned in its resistance to impatient ruthless disposal by the dominant economic community.
When the Music Stops/Starts
We sing in joy, in resolve, and in defiance. [...] We sing in glad welcome, unlike the commercial world that is eager to return to business as usual.
Fathers and Sons: Gifts and Grievances
A defining claim in our common life, and therefore defining subject for gospel reflection, is the alienation and hoped-for reconciliation between fathers and sons.
Due Cause for “Alas”
[The tenth commandment is] a dire warning against economic practices and land policies that permit the strong to occupy and control more and more of creation at the expense of needy neighbors, and at a cost to the wellbeing of creation.
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.