Walter Brueggemann and Shalom – an exegesis, exposition and vision.

41BX1J47Y1L._SY291_BO1 204 203 200_QL40_ML2_I first read Brueggemann's small masterpiece on Shalom in the first years of ministry in the 1970's. "Living Toward a Vision" was only lightly updated in the early 1980's, and remains in print as the early prophetic voice of Walter Brueggemann. More than that, its central concern, "the relentless contemporary agenda of peace", is as urgent as it has ever been.
 
We all long for wise and hopeful voices in despairingly stupid times. This 200 page book is a handbook on subversion – of such forces as the urge to violence, the greed that consumes, the idolatry of power, the citadels of untruth and social corrosion.
 
The church has to learn to speak into realities like these, living, talking and insisting with a new rhetoric of peace whose goal is shalom.
 
Shalom! That rich loam of a word out of which grows human flourishing, just and humane economics, respect for persons and communities, enthusiasm for the common good, and all of this by ourselves surrendering the idolatries that resist and resent shalom by maintaining systems that poison the sources of genuine human welfare.

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