1978 Fortress Press

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

Reading this book is certainly a watershed event in my life. Sometime in the early 90s, Jamie Howison (priest of St. Benedict’s Table), Larry Campbell (Unlikely Icon, bass) and I studied this book together once a week for several months at a diner on Main St. that offered a hamburger so large that if you could finish it, you didn’t have to pay for it.

Ironically, the book is about the reality of the church of North America living in the most powerful, most consummative Empire in history.

Empire, Brueggemann asserts, with its religion of static triumphalism co-opts and domesticates any alternative vision, cannot permit a free God who is not subordinated to the Pharaoh/King, and maintains itself through a politics of exploitation and oppression.

Tracing the history of an alternative consciousness (the Kingdom of God) to the Royal Consciousness of empire, Brueggemann begins with Moses’ exodus from Egypt, calling it the "primal scream that permits the beginning of history. His exploration continues through to the birth of Jesus which "created a new historical situation for marginal people that none in their despair could have anticipated."

All the while, Brueggemann is conscious of his place in history, living as a beneficiary of an empire incomparably greater than Egypt or Rome. In such times, the prophet 1. dares to criticize the empire’s social practices and mythic pretensions and 2. evocatively imagines, articulates and energizes an alternative community toward a new future whose politics of compassion and justice reflect God’s freedom.

As I’ve thought about this book over the years, and Brueggemann’s description of the prophetic ministry being twofold: criticizing and energizing - I am quite aware that the first is much easier than the second. But smug criticism without imaginative energizing is a bogus prophetic ministry and one we/I see (and practice) too often.

Walter Brueggemann (I believe) is currently Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. And this book, The Prophetic Imagination, was voted as one of the “Top 100 Religious Books of the 20th Century” by a large panel of regular contributors to Christianity Today.

Other books of Walter Brueggemann I’ve read are:

Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1989.

The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984.

Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann. Fortress Press, 2003.

Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayer of Walter Brueggemann. Fortress Press, 2004

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2006 Bloomsbury Publishing

The title of this moving book refers to a tree in the backyard of a home in Ramla, Israel. The home is currently owned by Dalia, a Jewish woman whose family of Holocaust survivors emigrated from Bulgaria. But before Israel gained its independence in 1948, the house was owned by the Palestinian family of Bashir, who meets Dalia when he returns to see his family home after the Six-Day War of 1967. Journalist Tolan (Me & Hank) traces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the parallel personal histories of Dalia and Bashir and their families—all refugees seeking a home.

The story is compelling enough on its own, but Tolan interjects history throughout that I found illuminating and helpful. It helped me understand better the perspective and anxiety of individual Israelis but in the end, I don’t think there can ever be a resolution until Israel as a nation comes to value Palestinian rights and aspirations as equal to their own - as a matter of policy.

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