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Explores the book of Lamentations and its meaning for faith and
ministry today. The five poems that comprise Lamentations tell of
the community's pain in the aftermath of Jerusalem's destruction.
A decade ago, Walter Brueggemann called the church to journey
together for the good of our community through neighborliness,
covenanting, and reconstruction. He distilled this challenge to its
most basic issues: Where is the church going? What is its role in
contemporary society? What lessons does it have to offer a world
enmeshed in turbulent times? Published originally in 2010, Journey
to the Common Good spoke to an era defined in large part by
America's efforts to rebuild from an age of terror as it navigated
its way through an economic collapse. Today, the dual crises of the
coronavirus and the disease of racial injustice present daunting
new challenges for the church as it seeks the good of its
neighbors. In a new introduction to this updated edition,
Brueggemann links the wilderness tradition of Exodus to these
current crises, as a framework to help the church navigate this
time of risk and vulnerability and to pursue a genuine social
alternative to the governance of Pharaoh. The answer to the
question of the church's role in society is the same answer God
gave to the Israelites thousands of years ago: love your neighbor
and work for the common good.
"Smith's sage advice will aid Christians in recognizing the simple
joys of practicing their faith."--Publishers Weekly Western culture
is in a tailspin, and Christian faith is entangled in it: we do
kingdom things in empire ways. Western approaches to faith leave us
feeling depressed, doubting, anxious, and burned out. We know
something is wrong with the way we do faith and church in the West,
but we're so steeped in it that we don't know where to begin to
break old habits. Popular pastor and speaker Mandy Smith invites us
to be unfettered from the deeply ingrained habits of Western
culture so we can do kingdom things in kingdom ways again. She
explores how we can be transformed by new postures and habits that
help us see God already at work in and around us. The way forward
isn't more ideas, programs, and problem-solving but in Jesus's
surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness.
Ultimately, rediscovering childlike habits is a way for us to
remember how to be human. Unfettered helps us reimagine how to
follow God with our whole selves again and join with God's mission
in the world. Foreword by Walter Brueggemann.
What's the point of the church anyway? The emerging generation is
opting out of the church in large numbers. They're embarrassed at
how the church is portrayed in the media and dismayed at what
appears to be their options for participation. Is church really
necessary anymore in our day? Is it even possible? Tim Soerens sees
this unsettled state of affairs as an extraordinary opportunity:
the church, he says, is on the edge of a new possibility at the
very moment so much of it feels like it's falling apart. In his
extensive travels in all kinds of neighborhoods, Soerens has seen
the beginnings of this movement firsthand. In Everywhere You Look,
he lays out practical, actionable steps for building collaborative
communities in any neighborhood. Here is a vision of the church
grounded in a grassroots movement of ordinary people living out
what it means to be the church in their everyday lives. Read this
book—and join the movement.
Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and
acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a
kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted
planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The
abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture. We think
the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable
and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more
agile, more lean, more schooled, more, more, more. Give it up.
There is no such thing as customer satisfaction. We need a new
narrative, a shift in our thinking and speaking. An Other Kingdom
takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place
where life is ours to create together. This satisfying way depends
upon a neighborly covenant an agreement that we together, will
better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and
provide a livelihood. The neighborly covenant has a different
language than market-hype. It speaks instead in a sacred tongue.
Authors Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight invite
you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture,
with its constellations of empire and control. Discover an
alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a
culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not
inevitable a culture in which the social order produces enough for
all. They ask you to consider this other kingdom. To participate in
this modern exodus towards a modern community. To awaken its
beginnings are all around us. An Other Kingdom outlines this
journey to construct a future outside the systems world of
solutions.
Biblical faith is passionately and relentlessly material in its
emphasis. This claim is rooted in the conviction that the creator
God loves the creation and summons creation to be in sync with the
will of the creator God. This collection of essays is focussed on
the bodily life of the world as it ordered in all of its
problematic political and economic forms. The phrase of the title
'all flesh' in the flood narrative of Genesis 9 refers to all
living creatures who are in covenant with God - human beings,
animals, birds, and fish - as recipients of God's grace, as
dependent upon God's generosity, and as destined for praise and
obedience to God. The insistence on the materiality of life as the
subject of the Bible means that the difficult issues of economics
and the demanding questions of politics are front and centre in the
text. So the Pentateuch pivots around the Exodus narrative and the
emancipation from an unbearable context of abusive labour
practices. In a similar manner, the prophets endlessly address such
questions of social policy and the wisdom teachers reflect on how
to manage the material things of life and social relationships for
the well-being of the community. This emphasis, pervasive in these
essays, is a powerful alternative and a strong resistance against
all of the contemporary efforts to transcend (escape!) the material
into some form of the 'spiritual'. All around us are efforts to
find an easier, more harmonious faith. This may be evoked simply
because of a desire to shield economic, political advantage from
the inescapable critique of biblical faith. Such a temptation is a
serious misreading of the Bible and a critical misjudgment about
the nature of human existence. Thus the Bible addressed the most
urgent issues of our day, and refuses the 'religious temptation'
that avoids lived reality where the power of God is a work.
This collection of essays is drawn from a series of previous
collections to which the author has contributed that were designed
to honour senior scholars in the discipline of Old Testament study.
Each of these essays reflects a distinct intention depending on the
nature of the original collection in which they appeared and the
scholar who was being honoured. Taken together, however, this
collection amounts to an articulation of Brueggemann's distinctive
approach to theological interpretation of the Old Testament.
Already in his major volume on Old Testament theology, Brueggemann
proposed a dynamism of tension, dispute, and contradiction as the
text of ancient Israel sought to give voice to the mystery of God
as a sustaining and disruptive agent in the life of the world. Over
a long period of time, this collection reflects the author's
growing clarity about the task of Old Testament theology. It
further reflects on the nature of the biblical text and the way in
which the God who inhabits the text runs beyond all of our attempts
to define and explain. These essays reflect not so much on
methodological issues, but take up the substantive questions that
regularly occupied these ancient text-makers.
Using a model of orientation - disorientation - new orientation,
Brueggemann explores how the genres of the Psalms can'be viewed in
terms of their function. This results in fresh readings of these
ancient songs that illumine their spiritual depth. The voices of
the Psalms come through in all their bold realism.
The necessary context of prophetic preaching, Walter Brueggemann
argues, is a contestation between narratives: the dominant
narrative of our time, which promoting self-sufficiency at the
national level (through militarism) and the personal (through
consumerism), and the countervailing narrative of a world claimed
by a God who is gracious, uncompromisingand real. In previous work
Brueggemann has pointed us again and again to the indispensability
of imagination. Here he writes for those who bear responsibility
for regular proclamation in communities of faith, describing the
discipline of a prophetic imagination that is unflinchingly
realistic and unwaveringly candid.
A classic text in biblical theology--still relevant for today and
tomorrow. In this 40th anniversary edition of the classic text from
one of the most influential biblical scholars of our time, Walter
Brueggemann, offers a theological and ethical reading of the Hebrew
Bible. He finds there a vision for the community of God whose words
and practices of lament, protest and complain give rise to an
alternative social order that opposes the "totalism" of the day.
Brueggemann traces the lines from the radical vision of Moses to
the solidification of royal power in Solomon to the prophetic
critique of that power with a new vision of freedom in the
prophets. Linking Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus, he argues
that the prophetic vision not only embraces the pain of the people,
but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God
is doing. This edition builds off the revised and updated 2001
edition and includes a new afterword by Brueggemann and a new
foreword by Davis Hankins.
The Pivotal Moments in the Old Testament Series helps readers see
Scripture with new eyes, highlighting short, key texts-"pivotal
moments"-that shift our expectations and invite us to turn toward
another reality transformed by God's purposes and action. The book
of Exodus brims with dramatic stories familiar to most of us:
Moses' ringing proclamation to Pharaoh to "let my people go," the
freed Israelites astonished by manna in the wilderness, God's
descending on Mount Sinai in a cloud of fire and glory to deliver
the law to Moses and the people. These signs of God's liberating
agency, provision, and covenant have sustained oppressed peoples
over the ages. But Exodus is also a complex book, which is why we
divide it into two parts. Readers of parts one and two of Pivotal
Moments in the Book of Exodus will encounter multilayered
narratives about the mysterious action of the divine to overturn
exploitative systems, the giving of a new law meant to set the
people of Israel apart, and instructions for building a tabernacle
in which God will dwell in glory. How does a contemporary reader
make sense of it all? In Delivered into Covenant, Walter
Brueggemann offers a guide to the second half of Exodus-from
Israel's journey through the wilderness to Mount Sinai to the
establishment of the tabernacle-drawing out "pivotal moments" in
the text. Throughout, Brueggemann shows how Exodus consistently
reveals a God who is in radical solidarity with the powerless and
who is dedicated to cultivating a covenant people who act to
repudiate the powers of empire. Questions for reflection and
discussion are included at the end of each of the fourteen
chapters, making it ideal for individual or group study.
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Real World Faith
Walter Brueggemann
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R427
Discovery Miles 4 270
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'Wise words ... filled with a message of hope for humanity and the
world' - Irish Catholic Walter Brueggemann is beloved and respected
by scholars, preachers and laity alike for his penetrating insights
on Scripture and prophetic diagnoses of our culture. Both are woven
throughout this new collection of his writings, A Gospel of Hope,
which encourages readers to abandon what is safe and routine and
instead embrace the audacity required to live out one's faith. This
must-have volume gathers Brueggemann's wisdom on topics ranging
from anxiety and abundance to partisanship and the role of faith in
public life.
Addressing what many consider the world's most controversial
conflict, Naim Ateek offers a succinct primer on liberation
theology in the context of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and
self-determination. Beginning with the historical roots of this
struggle, he shows how the memory of the Holocaust served to trump
the claims and aspirations of the native inhabitants of Palestine,
and how later Israeli occupation and settlements in the West Bank
have contributed to their suffering and oppression. Supported by
many Western Christians, Israeli claims to the land rely on a
particular exclusivist reading of the Bible. In contrast, a
Palestinian theology of liberation responds with a counterstrategy
for biblical interpretation, emphasizing the prophetic themes of
inclusivity and justice. Ateek concludes by providing principles
for achieving security, peace, and justice for all peoples in
Israel/Palestine.
Silence is a complex matter. It can refer to awe before unutterable
holiness, but it can also refer to the coercion where some voices
are silenced in the interest of control by the dominant voices. It
is the latter silence that Walter Brueggemann explores, urging us
to speak up in situations of injustice. Interrupting Silence
illustrates that the Bible is filled with stories where
marginalized people break repressive silence and speak against it.
Examining how maintaining silence allows the powerful to keep
control, Brueggemann motivates readers to consider situations in
their lives where they need to either interrupt silence or be part
of the problem, convincing us that God is active and wanting us to
act for justice.
In this updated edition of the popular textbook An Introduction to
the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt introduce
the reader to the broad theological scope of the Old Testament,
treating some of the most important issues and methods in
contemporary biblical interpretation. This clearly written textbook
focuses on the literature of the Old Testament as it grew out of
religious, political, and ideological contexts over many centuries
in Israel's history. Covering every book in the Old Testament
(arranged in canonical order), the authors demonstrate the
development of theological concepts in biblical writings from the
Torah through postexilic Judaism. Incorporating the most current
scholarship, this new edition also includes concrete tips for doing
close readings of the Old Testament text, and a chapter on ways to
read Scripture and respond in light of pressing contemporary
issues, such as economic inequality, racial and gender justice, and
environmental degradation. This introduction invites readers to
engage in the construction of meaning as they venture into these
timeless texts.
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