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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 an accessible digest for readers who want to engage his writing on the topic.

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. The people of God, always susceptible to mentalities of scarcity, selfishness, and the compulsion to consume, are again and again called out by the subversive message of the prophets, and Jesus himself, to forsake exploitation and to liberate the marginalized—to return to covenant obedience and align themselves with God''s radical commitment to create and sustain a more just and flourishing world. Deliver Us extends this same message of salvation, insightfully elucidated by Brueggemann in this single volume, for the benefit of both individual readers and the contemporary church.

Questions for reflection are included at the end of each chapter, making this book ideal for individual or group study.

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 an accessible digest for readers who want to freshly engage his prophetically minded but approachable writing on the topic.

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. Words of worship do not fall vacant and inactive—they help bring into being realities both sacred and sociopolitical.

Throughout this exploration of the psalms, Brueggemann shows readers 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. Thus, psalms of praise express trust in and abandonment to God, and also pose sharp critiques of unjust public policies that abandon those who are socially invisible. The psalms of grief and lament accompany communities through real experiences of loss and suffering—but also make room for the sufferers to be heard and to challenge the status quo.

The language of worship, when used intentionally and with care, helps to create a reality marked by fidelity, abundance, truth, hope, and dependence on God. With Brueggemann as guide, readers can apprehend the potency of the psalms'' bold petition and dialogue with God, giving voice to the distressed and anticipating the transformation of our lives together and as a society.

Questions for reflection are included at the end of each chapter, making this book ideal for individual or group study.

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 an accessible digest for readers who want to freshly engage his prophetically minded but approachable writing on the topic.

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.

Hope Restored takes readers through the unfolding possibilities for a liberated human imagination in Scripture. Brueggemann envisions the Torah—including the divine promises made to Israel’s ancestral matriarchs and patriarchs, the travails of the exodus and its memory, and the giving of the law—as a collective effort to form a multigenerational community marked by gratitude and solidarity with the marginalized. The historical and prophetic books articulate the hope of shalom in the midst of brutal political violence driven by self-interested nations in which the people of God are often implicated. A deep consideration of Daniel offers a vision of resistance against and an ultimate righting of the abuses of sociopolitical machinations—through both human and divine means. The Psalms lead us into the space of lament, protest, and demand for God to make manifest new visions of life and justice that carry over into Jesus’ story of the aggrieved widow who gives a judge no peace until he grants her justice.

Exploring models of hope that are expressed through critique, persistence, vision, and holy inspiration in the Hebrew Bible and that find continued resonance in the traditions of Jesus, Brueggemann locates in the Scriptures a tenacious shalom that breaks through the rocky ground of struggle and suffering. This gritty, wide-awake hope is willing to be dissatisfied and to cry out against the oppressor, while reaching forward to imagine new alternatives with creativity and freedom, to bring into reality a social order that benefits and cares for all.

Questions for reflection are included at the end of each chapter, making this book ideal for individual or group study.