Audiobooks by Walter Brueggemann

Grace Abounds: God's Abundance against the Fear of Scarcity (Walter Brueggemann Library)

The Bible often associates God's grace with abundance. While it is sometimes equated with forgiveness, more often grace is described much more broadly in the texts of ancient Israel: as the divine self-giving that stands against various forms of scarcity. We are bombarded daily with the idea that there is not enough of anything—housing, jobs, resources. By contrast, the Bible shows again and again how God meets our needs abundantly but in such a way that unveils our profound ongoing need for God and for one another. The first part of Grace Abounds lays out fundamentals of biblical grace by focusing on some of our most basic needs—to eat, to use land, to find shelter—and four different types of responses from people in Scripture struggling to survive experiences of exile and forced migration. In the second part of the book, Brueggemann advocates for specific biblical practices that are appropriate to the reality and experience of God's grace and grace-full relationships with fellow creatures: keeping Sabbath, making doxology, bestowing blessing, offering forgiveness, and realizing reconciliation. Questions for reflection are included at the end of each chapter, making this book ideal for individual or group study.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Mike Lenz (Narrator)

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Waiting in Gratitude: Prayers of Joy

This collection of prayers by noted Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann can be used in both public worship and private devotion. These prayers run the gamut from particular days in the church year to special moments in the lives of worshiping communities to events playing out on the world stage. In all cases, the prayers show us how God accompanies us through all the moments and stages of our life, bringing us the joys of life even amid a broken and hurting world and especially offering a joyous calling in Christ to serve that world.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture

Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture. We think the free-market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more, more, more. Give it up. There is no such thing as customer satisfaction. We need a new narrative. An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place where life is ours to create together. This way depends upon a neighborly covenant-an agreement that we together, will better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and provide a livelihood. The authors invite you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture. Discover an alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable. An Other Kingdom outlines this journey to construct a future outside the systems world of solutions.

John Mcknight, Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann (Author), Mirron Willis (Narrator)

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Following into Risky Obedience: Prayers along the Journey

This collection of prayers by noted Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann can be used in both public worship and private devotion. These prayers run the gamut from particular days in the church year to special moments in the lives of worshiping communities to events playing out on the world stage. In all cases, the prayers show us how God accompanies us through all the moments and stages of our life, while simultaneously calling us to do the same for all those whom God has placed alongside us in the journey.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Brandon Pollock (Narrator)

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Acting in the Wake: Prayers for Justice

This collection of prayers by noted Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann can be used in both public worship and private devotion. These prayers run the gamut from particular days in the church year to special moments in the lives of worshiping communities to events playing out on the world stage. In all cases, the prayers spur us toward acts of justice and peacemaking and call on God to heal and restore God's hurting and broken people.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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Hope Restored: Biblical Imagination Against Empire

The Walter Brueggemann Library brings together the wide-ranging and enlivening thought of popular biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann over his storied career. Each volume collects previously published work on a biblical theme that has deeply informed Brueggemann's scholarship. In Hope Restored, Brueggemann points us toward energizing hope for an alternative life of social equity and thriving. In Brueggemann's work, hope is not understood as easy optimism but as an honest facing of the unjust structures that human beings have created and a call to lean into the deep symbols of Scripture that imagine the alternative way of God, restoring solidarity and relationship that have been eroded by the violence of empire. According to the witness of Scripture, the divine presence is never settled into the arrangements and structures of the status quo. It provokes God's people to imagine beyond what they see and beyond their own selfish interests. Hope is always strongest among those who grieve and are willing to insistently critique the complacent, death-dealing social order that coddles the privileged and keeps its foot on the neck of those seen as 'other' and to imagine new, whole-making realities on the horizon. Questions for reflection are included at the end of each chapter, making this book ideal for individual or group study.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Mike Lenz (Narrator)

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Our Hearts Wait: Worshiping Through Praise and Lament in the Psalms (Walter Brueggemann Library)

The Walter Brueggemann Library brings together the wide-ranging and enlivening thought of popular biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann over his storied career. Each volume collects previously published work on a biblical theme that has deeply informed Brueggemann's scholarship. In Our Hearts Wait, Brueggemann meditates on the emotional range of our longings and gratitudes in the psalms, revealing how this bold outpouring of our full selves to the divine has effects far beyond introspection. He traces how the language of the psalms offers a template for liturgies that shape not only our collective worship and communities, but the worlds they create and sustain. Throughout this exploration of the psalms, Brueggemann shows listeners how the language we use in worship performs what it proclaims. It nurtures and challenges us in seasons of orientation and praise, disorientation and grief, reorientation, and thanksgiving-bringing our full attention to each experience in its turn. But in doing so, the words and deeds of worship can also sharpen our awareness of social constructions and relationships that undergird our common life. They reveal power imbalances and uneven distributions of resources, and, if we let them, urge us forward in our efforts toward justice.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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Deliver Us: Salvation and the Liberating God of the Bible (Walter Brueggemann Library)

The Walter Brueggemann Library brings together the wide-ranging and enlivening thought of popular biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann over his storied career. Each volume collects previously published work on a biblical theme that has deeply informed Brueggemann's scholarship. This first volume in the series, Deliver Us, fittingly begins with the narrative of the exodus. Brueggemann has consistently brought attention to how the themes of the exodus event and the stories of the giving of the law that follow lay the groundwork for a biblical understanding of salvation. Drawn from numerous publications in recent decades, this volume reveals Brueggemann's clear understanding that divine liberation from exploitation and acquisitiveness also means liberation for generous action for the common benefit. This salvation involves not the security of the individual soul but a wholehearted transformation of social identities and relationships. With the gift of deliverance-dramatically enacted in the Hebrew people's being led out from the oppression of pharoah-comes the task of obedience-articulated in the covenantal laws given at Mount Sinai, in the wilderness, and beyond. Brueggemann shows how this double theme of the gift and the task is forged in the exodus narrative, then reenacted in salvation motifs throughout the Bible.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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The Prophetic Imagination: 40th Anniversary Edition

A classic book in biblical theology-still relevant for today and tomorrow. In this fortieth anniversary edition of the classic book from one of the most influential biblical scholars of our time, Walter Brueggemann, offers a theological and ethical reading of the Hebrew Bible. He finds there a vision for the community of God whose words and practices of lament, protest and complain give rise to an alternative social order that opposes the 'totalism' of the day. Brueggemann traces the lines from the radical vision of Moses to the solidification of royal power in Solomon to the prophetic critique of that power with a new vision of freedom in the prophets. Linking Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus, he argues that the prophetic vision not only embraces the pain of the people, but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God is doing. This edition builds off the revised and updated 2001 edition and includes a new afterword by Brueggemann and a new foreword by Davis Hankins.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Jim Denison (Narrator)

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An Introduction to the Old Testament, Third Edition: The Canon and Christian Imagination

In this updated edition of the popular textbook An Introduction to the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt introduce the listener to the broad theological scope of the Old Testament, treating some of the most important issues and methods in contemporary biblical interpretation. This clearly written textbook focuses on the literature of the Old Testament as it grew out of religious, political, and ideological contexts over many centuries in Israel's history. Covering every book in the Old Testament (arranged in canonical order), the authors demonstrate the development of theological concepts in biblical writings from the Torah through postexilic Judaism. Incorporating the most current scholarship, this new edition also includes concrete tips for doing close examinations of the Old Testament text, and a chapter on ways to read Scripture and respond in light of pressing contemporary issues, such as economic inequality, racial and gender justice, and environmental degradation. This introduction invites listeners to engage in the construction of meaning as they venture into these timeless texts.

Tod Linafelt, Walter Brueggemann (Author), James Anderson Foster (Narrator)

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A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament: 2nd Edition

This book has become a standard text in seminary and university classrooms. The purpose of this second edition is to help listeners come to a critically informed understanding of the Old Testament as the church's scripture. This book introduces the Old Testament both as a witness of ancient Israel and as a witness to the church and synagogue through the generations of those who have passed these texts on as scripture. The authors of this volume share a commitment to the interpretation of the Old Testament as a central resource for the life of the church today. At the same time, they introduce the Old Testament witness in a manner that honors the importance of biblical scholarship in helping students engage the variety of theological voices within the Old Testament. This second edition gives special attention to deepening and broadening theological interpretations by including, for example, issues related to gender, race, and class.

Bruce C. Birch, David L. Petersen, Terence E. Fretheim, Walter Brueggemann (Author), Tom Parks (Narrator)

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Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

In this new edition, popular author Walter Brueggemann writes that the Sabbath is not simply about keeping rules but rather about becoming a whole person and restoring a whole society. Brueggemann calls out our 24/7 society of consumption, a society in which we live to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess. We want more, own more, use more, eat more, and drink more. Brueggemann shows listeners how keeping the Sabbath allows us to break this restless cycle and focus on what is truly important: God, other people, all life. Perfect for groups or self-reflection, Sabbath as Resistance offers a transformative vision of the wholeness God intends, giving world-weary Christians a glimpse of a more fulfilling and simpler life through Sabbath observance.

Walter Brueggemann (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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