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.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
To many people the “economy” meant and means good paying jobs that produce greater purchasing power. But of course, in presidential elections, it is always “the economy.”
Jubilee Recovered
As an Old Testament teacher, Walter Brueggemann has often been asked a recurring set of questions about the Jubilee text. But no question has been asked more frequently than this: “There is no evidence that the Jubilee Year was ever really practiced, is there?”
Does Not Have Love
Walter Brueggemann writes how it is the counterwork of the creator God to protect from human probes into the hidden ways in which creation functions.
The Father God Who is No God-Father
In the course of a family household, there are characteristically two most demanding, most rewarding relationships: the relationship of marital partners and the relationship of parent and child.
The High Cost of Prudence
Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time (Amos 5:13).
Lethal Discovery/Toxic Denial
The “Doctrine of Discovery” is constituted by a series of papal teachings in the 15th century, culminating in 1493, the year after Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World. This series of papal declarations asserted that the “New World” rightly belonged to White Europeans and was to be divided between Spain and Portugal, two states fully supportive of the Vatican. That teaching, over time, provided cover and justification for White occupation of the New World with an eager readiness to convert, enslave, or kill the indigenous population.
Written Down, Written Up
The Greek term is apographo, that is, “written down.” All were to be “written down” under imperial auspices in the same way I had been “written down” by the church and by the government. Joseph and Mary, vulnerable peasants from the shabby village of Nazareth, were ‘written down” by the empire in its long reach into the peasant economy.
On Gerrymandered Texts
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.