The Christian gospel, says Brueggemann, is too easily preached and heard. Too often technical reason and excessive religious certitude reduce the gospel to coercive, debilitating pietisms that mask the text's meaning and freeze the hearers heart. With skill and imagination, Brueggemann demonstrates how the preacher can engage in daring speech-differently voiced and therefore differently hear…
Thoughtful and eloquent, as timely (or timeless) now as when it was originally published in 1956, Thoughts in Solitude addresses the pleasure of a solitary life, as well as the necessity for quiet reflection in an age when so little is private. Thomas Merton writes: "When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is he…
This book attempts to construct a philosophy of the priesthood, an endeavor that may seem strange to some. After all, philosophy, many priests will recall from their days as seminarians, was a dry, abstract discipline that was supposed to be the handmaiden of theology. Philosophy was anything but practical. Indeed its professors and proponents seemed to glory in its impracticality and its extre…