Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

To be "defiled" by empire is to be robbed of a distinct identity that permits freedom against dominant culture. "Fasting" as alert abstention may be the order of the day that will make the asking of prayers more serious and compelling.

One Way to think of the market ideology and the empire is that it produces alienation and loss of human vitality. The culture flows from the assumption that the accumulation of commodities will make us safe and happy.

When a god is fashioned into a golden commodity (or even lesser material); divine subject becomes divine object, and agent becomes commodity.

The crowd, in its uncritical political engagement, is not always discerning about new possibility that comes with risk and often votes in fear for the status quo.

Such utterance staggers and offends among the listeners. But it also opens vistas of possibility where we had not thought to go and where in fact, we are most reluctant to go.

Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.9 He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know.

In his great act of humility and washing, he broke with all the models of humanity that are visible in our own time and place: the rat race of productivity, the fear for survival, the frenzy of accumulation, and the deathly sense of self-sufficiency.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.

Two movements in human life are important: (a) deep reluctance to let loose of a world that has passed away, and (b) capacity to embrace a new world being given.

Silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth.