If 2004 was a year I got to grips more clearly with Tom Wright's work on the New Testament and Jesus and Stanley Hauerwas on theological ethics, 2005 is probably going to be the year I get reading Walter Brueggemann. I'm already working my way through The Prophetic Imagination and Cadences of Home, his commentary on Isaiah 40-66 is on my bookshelf and The Message of the Psalms is on order from Amazon. Brueggemann, much like Wright, writes for the church and not just the academy. He doesn't do biblical studies for the sake of biblical studies, but always with the question, what does this mean for the church today? Like Wright and Hauerwas, he is a (prophetic) voice that the church must listen to and learn from.
Ah now, I've just come across Hauerwas...
http://apostliberal.blogspot.com/2005/02/get-boot-in.html#comments
...would you reccomend him, then?
Posted by: Laurence | February 21, 2005 at 04:29 PM
Big time - Brueggemann has written some great stuff. I think you'd really like a lot of what he says, especially with regard to 'imagination' - he thinks that we've lost the ability to imagine something alternative - we're stuck in our technological consumer therapeutic militarist nightmare. See this post. Hauerwas writes on the back of Cadences of Home - 'I thank God for Walter Brueggemann'
Posted by: andy goodliff | February 21, 2005 at 04:44 PM