A Journey In Imagination offers the hope of an alternative to a world convulsed by hostility and violence. Through an imaginative journey into Bible stories, incidents, and verses, the possibility of reversing hostility in both personal and communal life is explored. Biblical hospitality is neither a head in the sand nor a pie in the sky pleasantry. Instead it is the daring and challenging work of reversing hostility through seeing the 'other' fully as a human being. We may be failing at relationships, but that does not mean that we are doomed forever to fail. Too many of the tensions between...

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.

Description: ""Dad. I've got very, very, very bad news. Peter was killed tonight . . ."" With that middle-of-the-night phone call, life for the Mayer family plunged from ""best-ever year"" to months and years of dealing with the oppressive presence of Peter's unending absence. A letter from his father to the freshly deceased Peter, intended for the memorial service, became the first in a torrent of letters from his dad to Peter, though which his dad poured out agonized and angry grief. In the letters, Peter's dad laments the way events otherwise beautiful for Peter's wife, five-year-old...

How can we connect the Gospels--the fundamental texts of Christian faith--to our own experience of inner and outer life? This is the question that animates Connecting to the Gospel. In it James Boyd White presents a series of Gospel passages, together with the sermons he gave on these passages as a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, with brief commentaries and questions on each as well. The whole is designed as an aid to thought and reflection about the issues raised by the Gospel passages, as they relate both to our own larger culture and to our internal religious experiences. The texts...

It was the center of learning, commerce, wealth, and religion. Devoted to materialism, extravagance, luxury, and the pursuit of sensual pleasure, it was a privileged society. But, there was also injustice, poverty, and oppression. It was the great and ancient Babylon--the center of the universe.

And now we find Babylon redux today in Western society. Consumer capitalism, a never-ending cycle of working and buying, a sea of choices produced with little regard to life or resources, societal violence, marginalized and excluded people, a world headed toward climactic calamity. Where...

Grounded in the Living Word responds to the disconnect between pastoral care and biblical interpretation in a unique -- and much-needed -- manner. In this cross-disciplinary conversation Denise Dombkowski Hopkins and Michael S. Koppel engage the inter-sections between biblical stories and human stories in order to assist care practitioners and Bible interpreters in the transformative work of healing pastors, communities, and ultimately, creation.

Walter Brueggemann has been one of the leading voices in Hebrew Bible interpretation for decades; his landmark works in Old Testament theology have inspired and informed a generation of students, scholars, and preachers. These chapters gather his recent addresses and essays on every part of the Hebrew Bible, many of them never published before, bringing his erudition to bear on those practicesprophecy, lament, prayer, faithful imagination, and a holy economicsthat alone may usher in a humane and peaceful future for our cities.

Description: In the fall of 2006, Mark Douglas, a professor of Christian ethics, was invited to write weekly editorials for a secular newspaper. Surprisingly, his editor placed no limits around either the content or the rhetoric of those editorials. This book offers Professor Douglas's reflections on that work and the editorials themselves. Taken together, they model a particular vision of Christian engagement in the public sphere. This book offers a single sustained argument about why and how the Christian faith should shape the public lives of its adherents. Both the reflections and the...

Contesting the deepest issues in biblical theology, this book offers a collection of perceptive & authoritative essays by Walter Brueggemann.

This title provides sharp insight from the Old Testament on Christian communities in today's global context.