I'm glad I picked this up again and reread it. Brueggemann talks about how, in contemporary America, the gospel is heard but as a truth greatly reduced. We hear it but not hear because we assume we understand fully. We've flattened it. We've made it prose and the gospel has to be r-enlivened for us by a poet--the preacher.

Brueggemann doesn't just point at the ways that the Bible speaks to our culture today, He also looks incisively at the many false roads in our culture. OUr numbness and ache, our vacillation between the poles of alienation and rage, our restlessness and greed, and our resistance. In each case, he examines a range of passages from the Bible (from Torah, Prophets and Writings) and shows us how God breaks through our modern cultural malaise and alerts us that an alternative way is possible.

This book came from the 1989 Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching at Yale Divinity School. Many 'preaching books' get bogged down in exegetical details or homiletic craft. If you ever read or heard Brueggemann you know that he is a perceptive reader of texts and cares about craft. But I value this book more for inspiration than implementation. ( )

An interesting look at preaching using Old Testament themes as examples. The fundamental thesis is that the preacher needs to be a poet. The book helpfully explores what we (preachers) ought to be saying.

This is an amazingly powerful reproduction of Brueggemann's 1989 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University. Fredrick Buechner's book is similarly engaging, but not so out-and-out powerful. Built strongly on OT prophetic texts, it demands much both of preacher & listener, and looks at the modern social condition with a cold, yet compassionate, eye--law and gospel both needed and given. ( )

Here we have what we have come to expect from Walter Brueggeman-a fired imagination, harnessed and disciplined. He always respects the integrity both of the biblical text and of the listeners, but he will not allow them to stay apart. ( )