Here is a lecture Walter Brueggemann gave a little more than a year ago, brimming with a radicalism that no atheist radical I've ever read or heard can begin to approach. Memory as Temptation To Amnesia.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Sunday, May 29, 2016
The Past Is Quite Unpredictable
I began this year thinking I was going to devote a lot of time to reading, thinking about and discussing Reinhold Niebuhr but have spent most of it with Walter Brueggemann instead. One of the revelations of listening to his amazing knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures and his even more amazing resultant insights into their meaning is how inadequate even an informed but surface reading of them is. A second thing is the extent to which you can't understand the Christian scriptures without a constant reference to the Jewish scriptures. A third thing is how, as you go deeper into the entire Bible, you discover an ever deepening radical liberalism, the very opposite of what most propaganda about it asserts it to be. I've pointed out a number of times that even the most arch conservative of recent popes, JP II and Benedict XVI among them, are truly radical in their economics and social positions - excepting, of course, whenever sexuality and reproduction are part of it. I think that any inclination among those popes toward conservatism is thwarted by their need to take the scriptures seriously. Most of the awful things that popes have done have had to be done in violation of the scriptures because they are uniformly forbidden by them.
Here is a lecture Walter Brueggemann gave a little more than a year ago, brimming with a radicalism that no atheist radical I've ever read or heard can begin to approach. Memory as Temptation To Amnesia.
Here is a lecture Walter Brueggemann gave a little more than a year ago, brimming with a radicalism that no atheist radical I've ever read or heard can begin to approach. Memory as Temptation To Amnesia.
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This is why I say I became extremely radicalized in seminary.
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