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.