Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

Breaking the silence" is always counterdiscourse that tends to arise from the margins of society, a counter to present power arrangements and to dominant modes of social imagination.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

It is the silence-breaking cry that begins the process that turns pain into joy.

prophetic preaching can take place only where the preacher is deeply embedded in the YHWH narrative.

As the church in reform draws closer to its core confession, it inescapably embraces its most radical vision that violates and contradicts conventional practice in its social context. What makes such reform difficult, moreover, is the fact that while we ponder the radical core claims of faith, we ourselves are variously enmeshed in conventional practices that are inimical to the gospel.

Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham

In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.

As we go to the places where we are called by God—sometimes gladly, sometimes reluctantly, always in anxiety—we are drawn into the newness of God's future.

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.

It is no obvious or "natural" matter to resituate our lives with reference to the holy power and purpose of God. But that is what we do in prayer.

People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway. THE ISSUE OF LAND The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights.

In his Sermon on the Mount, [Jesus] declares to his disciples: No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matt. 6: 24) 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.