Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

Save us, Lord, from a religion that ignores the cries of the exploited and oppressed. Lead us into a deeper faith that challenges injustice and makes the sacrifices that must be made to build a society that is ever more truly human. Amen.

The woes constitute the most radical criticism, for they are announcements and anticipations of death. The woes of Luke are pronounced against the rich (v. 24), the full (v. 25a), the ones who laugh (v. 25b), and the ones who enjoy social approval (v. 26)—which is to say that the death sentence is upon those who live fully and comfortably in this age without awareness or openness to the new future coming.

we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity.

The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.

The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.

In our case, we live in a National Security State that is committed to perpetual war, in a consumerism that reduces everything and everyone to a commodity. As a consequence, children become statistics for sales reports, military recruitment, prison population, and debt. It is, among us, all about subordinating the future of children to the success of market ideology wherein the money and power flow to the top of the pyramid while increasing numbers of children are left behind.

A totalizing regime cannot tolerate dissent or subversion. Thus, as is necessary, totalizing regimes must silence dissent, must prohibit subversion, must control artists, must banish poets, and when necessary must kill prophets.

Such brutality is required because dissenters, subversives, artists, poets, and prophets invite thought that the regime is not absolute, that its claims to legitimacy are not ultimate, that its policies are not beyond criticism nor its practices beyond destabilization.

Nobody is profane or unclean. Nobody can be discounted. Nobody is second-class. Nobody is subject to dismissal. Nobody should be cheap labor. Nobody should suffer systems of violence. Old living is contradicted by the truth of the Spirit. The superstition of superiority is broken. The old distinction of chosenness is placed in question.

It is the work of the poet to imagine YHWH out beyond old stereotypes and to show us that the God of Israel, at the very moment of risk, is a God of healing, transformative, covenantal fidelity.

Anomie is not a danger only for the young; it may surface in what is now conventionally called the "crisis of mid-life" or anywhere else.

It is clear that human agents have been at work through the entire traditioning process. They witness to the will, purpose, and presence of YHWH, who remains inscrutably hidden in and through the text and yet who discloses YHWH's own holy self through that same text.

This likely means the Torah of Deuteronomy, but it is not spelled out. Most spectacularly, there is only one condition spelled out … keep Sabbath!

do not think for one moment that there is any ready transfer from this narrative to our real-life crisis with the virus. The Bible does not often easily "apply." The Bible does, however, invite an open imagination that hopes for the best outcomes of serious scientific research. At the same time, it affirms that deeply inscrutable holy reality is in, with, under, and

doing economic justice for the vulnerable in generous, intentional ways, is communion with God.

The cry that breaks the silence is the sound of bodies becoming fully aware of what the predatory system has cost and being fully aware as well that it can be otherwise.

The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God.

In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost.

While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges upon the present. Conversely, liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present.

power is not free to disregard truth.

The reason Miriam and the other women can sing and dance at the end of the exodus narrative is the emergence of new social reality in which the life of the Israelite economy is no longer determined and compelled by the insatiable production quotas of Egypt and its gods (15:20–21).

This story begins wherever there is enough courage and freedom and daring and sensibility to acknowledge that the pain of ruthless exploitation is not normal and cannot be borne.

Until that moment of utterance, every objective analysis of economic production in Egypt would have concluded that the pain of the peasants is a necessary, normal, even natural arrangement of labor—the cost of doing business.

God is a magnet who draws pain to God's own self.