Finished reading: Journey to the Common Good by Walter Brueggemann 📚
“I believe it is impossible to overstate the defining nature of the empire of force among us, if empire is understood as a political, economic, military, ideological practice of self-security and control. It is not clear that life can be construed beyond empire; but the poets have to try. The poets, because they are poets, never arrive there, for their poetry would then become program. That, however, does not render the poetry as a failure or as an irrelevance. It only affirms that alternatives to the lethal reductionism of empire require imagination and courage and staying power. In that ancient world, it was required that old Jerusalem be relinquished and new Jerusalem be undertaken. It is no less required now that there be relinquishing and undertaking.”