Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.

Faith is both the conviction that justice can be accomplished and the refusal to accept injustice.

Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church's action in prayer.

There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church's propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of "male and female.

The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God's people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as "hands" in the service of a command economy. Rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness. All of that is implicit in the reality and exhibit of divine rest.

Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.

God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.

We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.