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Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

Walter Brueggemann

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Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Danger
Alternative
Proposing
Single
Urges
Futures
Wants
Prophet
Totalitarian
Imagination
Frightened
Regime
Alive
Alternatives
Vocation
Artist
King
Urge
Keep
Thus
Regimes
Every
Kings
Ministry
Thinkable

More quotes by Walter Brueggemann

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People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done.
Walter Brueggemann
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We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
Walter Brueggemann
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When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.
Walter Brueggemann
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The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.
Walter Brueggemann
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The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.
Walter Brueggemann
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The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
Walter Brueggemann
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There are buoyant powers of healing at work in the world that do not depend on us, that we need not finance or keep functioning and that are not at our disposal.
Walter Brueggemann
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Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
Walter Brueggemann
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We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.
Walter Brueggemann
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Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.
Walter Brueggemann
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Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.
Walter Brueggemann
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On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.
Walter Brueggemann
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The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.
Walter Brueggemann
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Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.
Walter Brueggemann
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And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.
Walter Brueggemann
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The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
Walter Brueggemann
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The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.
Walter Brueggemann
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Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
Walter Brueggemann
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God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
Walter Brueggemann
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Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural, but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.
Walter Brueggemann