Finished reading: Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination by Conrad L. Kanagy 📚

Not quite what I expected. I really enjoyed listening to the author talk about his book and about his admiration for Walter Brueggemann. And the book is peppered with good insights, both from Brueggemann and from Kanagy. But I don’t think it lived up to the genre of “theological biography.” Brueggemann’s fascinating family history in the Prussian Union and the German Pietist tradition, and especially his lifelong regard for his father’s ever-struggling but ever-genuine life as a pastor — these are mentioned repetitively throughout the book but I thought given little depth or storyline, and no real (narrative or theological) progression to follow. Neither is much insight given into Brueggemann’s actual theological writings.

Still, Kanagy presents a short, affectionate look at a prolific theologian who has shown great courage amid “ambivalence and ambiguity” — even, if not especially, amid his own. As Kanagy puts it, through his life Brueggemann has shown

the courage to tell the empire to be merciful, to show the empire its injustice, to remind the empire of its short-lived power, and to remind the empire that in front of it, [visible through the “prophetic imagination,"] lies an alternative reality that doesn’t have the empire’s name on it.

If you like, here’s a short clip where you can hear that straight from the horse’s mouth.

Kitchen Chalk Talk

I showed this to three different people tonight — while still chuckling. Not only did no one laugh, they said it wasn’t even humorous.

I am… aghast.

Thomas J. Balcerski, on the lasting, and almost universally scorned, friendship of Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Theirs is an example of how the tumultuous politics of the 1850s and 1860s transformed the meaning of a friendship from the purely personal to the highly political.… The terrible events of the Civil War had permanently divided long-time friends and literary associates and, in turn, had changed how each [person] understood friendship itself.… Their friendship suggests how political actors in this period, especially, came to define themselves in opposition to those who stood against them…

He had a camera-shy friend with him 5 seconds ago

Kay Ryan:

Current mood — and inability to understand how the world works — has Michael Budde ringing in my ears. I’m surrounded by housing markets that I do not understand or control; city and state planning projects that I do not understand or control; job markets that I do not understand or control; health care systems that I do not understand or control; performance evaluations that I do not understand or control; compliance items and training modules that I do not understand or control — all of which presuppose the inability to do anything about any of it.

Is cog-in-machine syndrome a diagnosable condition? 😵‍💫

James Wood:

Simon notes the enormous popularity of Faustian fables in the nineteenth century, characterized by something new: “the possibility of people being victorious against the cloven-hoofed one, of being more talented in the skills of wit and duplicity.” …

Today… We’re all Faustians now. These days, Simon argues, in an excoriating, eloquent final chapter, we write our contracts not in blood but in silicon—both figuratively, insofar as we sign away our identities and privacies for all the short-term benefits of material ease, and literally, whenever we scroll rapidly through one of those unreadable online contracts, eager only to assent. Somewhere out there in the ether, the ghost in the machine hears our weak little mouse clicks and pricks up his horns. 

Currently Reading: Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚; and also: Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination by Conrad L. Kanagy 📚

They’ve been standing next to each other on the queue shelf for months, and I’m curious what they’ve been talking about 🤓