Jun 26, 2018
It’s now been 25 years since I first read Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination in a theology class. I still have my original copy, from the era when I first learned from a friend to write not only my name on the first page, but also the date when I acquired the book. Thank goodness I started doing that, because now it’s so satisfying to leap back a quarter century to when these words just knocked me over in my first reading. The pages are exhausted with lines and stars and (probably cringe-inducing, excessively earnest) commentary from me as a college student. I’m back with Brueggemann for lots of reasons, but here’s just a taste on his opening page:
It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that where such language stops we find humanness diminished.
Related: building as a noun and a verb.