This is a sermon which Brueggemann gave the day after the lecture I posted yesterday. Brueggemann seems to be unable to give a bad or ineffective or irrelevant talk. I can't claim to have read more than about 4% of his books - none of them are facile or easy reads, though his writing is very good, too, but so far he doesn't seem to be able to write a bad book, either.
If someone had told me in 2000, as I was beginning to go online to lefty blogs and websites and to read the lefty magazines online that by 2017 the thinkers I'd have the most respect for would turn out to be ministers and lay ministers out of the Reform tradition, Rabbis and theologians I'd have thought it was unlikely. But that's how this has turned out. And it has become ever more so since I started on the project of trying to figure out why American liberalism lost its force and has remained on the ropes since c. 1965. I am more certain than I was half way through that this is the key of what went wrong, that secular, materialist "liberalism" washed out the foundation of egalitarian liberalism in favor of its anti-religious atheism, gulling way too many religious liberals in ways that Brueggemann alludes to in this talk. I really do think that a lot of this comes from the mistake of putting the university based "left" in the forefront of liberalism, the status granted to scientistic materialism and the distortions of a century and a quarter or half of what gained status in academic culture. A lot of that is contained in the pseudo-sciences such as sociology and anthropology and in the absurdity of surveys and polling.
I'm hoping to write more later, I'm dealing with the cold today. Even with the fire going for hours I'm still wrapped in blankets. I'm thinking of putting up a tent to crawl into in my kitchen.
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