Walter Brueggemann

Against the easy assurance of a too-enculturated religion, Walter Brueggemann refocuses the preaching task around the decentering, destabilizing, always risky Word that confronts us in Scripture - if we have the courage to hear. These powerful essays, previously available only in journals, are here combined with a newly composed preface and introduction. Includes a foreword from the Reverend William "Preaching is an audacious task. It has always been so." So Walter Brueggemann begins this bold set of reflections on the preaching task, a task at once foolish and dangerous in a world where the rulers of this age keep a close eye on any proclamation that may disturb present arrangements. His tone in turn is passionate, intimate, critical, and wise. Brueggemann's perspective on preaching is always shaped first and foremost by the militant word of Scripture, especially as spoken through the prophets. Brueggemann understands the biblical texts to redescribe the world as God's world.^ It follows that when preaching is truly biblical, it will be subversive preaching. Brueggemann is unsparing in his critique of the sort of preaching that is but an echo of prevailing culture, content to live within the limits of the status quo. Yet he is also endlessly hopeful that the church may remain a place--perhaps "the last place in town"--where a different understanding of reality can still find a voice. "Brueggemann provokes an emergency and shames an accommodated, culture--bound, tamed, therapeutic church with his fecund, prophetic re-descriptions and creative transpositions that speak the biblical word into our time and place. Unintimidated by the disestablishment of the American Protestant church, he always hears something for us to say that the world is literally dying to hear.^ He thus gives testimony to a ceaselessly interesting God who speaks, reveals, and discloses, a God who is accurately known only through God's Word, and only through a gaggle of Spirit--filled, evangelical preachers whom the Word has made militant." --From the Foreword by William H. Willimon.

"In this completely revised edition of a true classic, Walter Brueggemann examines four different sets of David texts, both narrative and poetic. Each text reflects a particular social context, a particular social vision, and a particular community. Thus these stories and poems offer distinctly different "modes of truth" concerning this pivotal biblical figure. The tribe, the family, the state, and the assembly each brought a different agenda to their portrayals of David. Each fashioned different portraits of the one who helped define them and was defined by them."--BOOK JACKET.

In this thoroughly revised edition of a classic in spirituality, Walter Brueggemann guides the reader into a thoughtful and moving encounter with the Psalms. This new edition includes a revised text, new notes, and new bibliography.The movement and meeting of God with us is indeed a speech-event in which new humanness is evoked among us. Being attentive to language means cultivating the candid imagination to bring our own experience to the Psalms and permitting it to be disciplined by the speech of the Psalms. And, conversely, it means letting the Psalms address us and having that language reshape our sensitivities and fill our minds with new pictures and images that may redirect our lives.

Writing in a popular, conversational style, Walter Brueggemann shows what the prophetic imagination is and why it can transform the present in powerful and unexpected ways. He describes the prophetic imagination as a force which brings religious traditions together with the contemporary realities of our society. A clear understanding of the prophetic imagination, combining its rich Old Testament heritage and the prophetic ministry of Jesus, leads to the development of an alternative consciousness for our time.

Presents a practical guide to understanding misunderstood and complex passages of the Bible including the holiness of God and faith.