I'm going To Be Away Till Thursday If Not Longer

Family issues.

Here is an really great conversation between Krista Tippett and Walter Breuggemann about the Prophetic Imagination.

Here is a partial transcript of it, as condensed for the program On Being.

MS. TIPPETT: You know, I heard you speak very poignantly this morning to preachers about the fact that there are things that can't be said from the pulpit. Sometimes it feels like they should be said. You said there are silences that it's hard to break. Following on the way we're talking about, this is hard for preachers, religious leaders, to adopt this prophetic voice or draw on these prophetic themes. You know, I think even if you and I talk about this, it's kind of a difficult conversation to have in this culture, right?

MR. BRUEGGEMANN: It's very difficult, and I think the difficulty is that all of us, liberals and conservatives, all of us are basically contained in the ideology of consumer capitalism. We want that to be our universe of meaning. And when you get a poetic articulation that moves outside of that, it's just too anxiety-producing for most of us, so we try to stop that kind of talk. In a local church, obviously people have a lot of leverage for being able to stop that kind of talk.

MS. TIPPETT: So what is it hard for preachers to talk about here?

MR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think at the broadest level, it is hard to talk about the fact — I think it's a fact — that our society has chosen a path of death in which we have reduced everything to a commodity. We believe that there are technical solutions to everything, so it doesn't matter whether you talk about the over-reliance on technology, the mad pursuit of commodity goods, our passion for violence now expressed as our war policies. All of those are interrelated to each other and none of us, very few of us, really want to have that exposed as an inadequate and dehumanizing way to live. I think, if one is grounded in the truth of the gospel as a Christian, that's what we have to talk about. So preachers are really put in a very difficult fix of having been entrusted to talk about that stuff.

MS. TIPPETT: And they also belong to this culture.

MR. BRUEGGEMANN: That's right.