What I love about this hymn is, well, the wideness of God's love that it presents. Friends, I need a wide love, for I fall off the wagon way too often for anything otherwise. I hear often that the "Christian life is about walking a fine line--not getting too carried away with this grace thing and not getting caught in legalism." Friend, I walked that fine line for five decades and I can't do it anymore. In a sobriety test I've become too intoxicated with God's love to believe that I am capable of negotiating that line successfully nor do I believe that God expects me to live in such bondage.

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 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Best,

Dr. Kanagy

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Mercy, like grace was always described as getting what I did not deserve and justice getting what I deserved. But in an interview with Anita Garber, an emerging adult beginning a blog about adoption and African American identity, Anita asked: "Conrad, what is justice?" 

For all I thought I knew about God's justice, I paused for awhile before finding myself saying: "Anita, I think justice is offering to every person what they deserve as human beings who have the imprint of God upon them. Offering every individual the dignity they deserve as one created in God's image." This was a new thought for me--that God's justice is perhaps not offering others what they deserve for "what they have done" but for "who they are" innately as God's child--whether they are aware of their being God's child or not.

Perhaps given the grand love that the Father had for his prodigal son, what he offered the son was not just "underserved favor" but what the Father simply understood that son was deserving of as his son, his child, despite what the son had done.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

What I received from my father over the past two decades has helped to bring healing to the pain and torment I experienced in those tent revivals of George Brunk II. I am sure that George and others like him brought salvation to some and I have no doubt he believed he was doing God's will. But what I never experienced in those moments nor did I sense in the message or ethos of those meetings was the compassion, kindness, acceptance, protection and safety that I now find in my own father who over this year has "received me just as I am" and affirms that "this is my story and this is my song" just as it is.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

And then the story Jesus' tells of the prodigal son who just as easily could be a daughter, who leaves home for hell, and with tail between their legs comes crawling back with more shame than they know what to do with, knowing they've screwed the whole thing up, only to be embraced by a Father who had never stopped looking for them, who when they finally showed up said nothing their being underserving about the massive party that the father was about to throw. No, the Father threw a party because the child he loved had finally come back home where he could be loved again. The Father threw a party because he could be a father to his son once again. The Father threw a party because his son who had been dead, he said, was now alive once again.

Friends, this if grace. Coming home again without being told what a failure I was. Being given new life without being reminded that it was I who had chosen to take that life in the first place. Being thrown a massive party in my honor simply because I am honored "just as I am, without one plea." Being loved extravagantly without a whiff of shame upon me. 

Now this is good news I'd love to share. 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

As I face a classroom full of students who are in deep pain, who jokingly but not really, respond to "How are you doing" with "I'm dead," who more than ever struggle with anxiety and depression, and who claim gender identities not recognized in the church--I will not separate myself from them, I will not preach hell-fire and brimstone, and I will not militarize against them or their culture. For while for the last one hundred years the church could have been offering the good news of Jesus, we like Peter too often denied that we knew that Jesus. No, I will stay with my students who so much need the good news that over the past year I finally found. And if it took a pastor that many decades, why shouldn't I be patient with them. For if its not good news for them its also not good news for me.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

I know that over the last year, some and perhaps many, assume I've gone soft on sin and have become lukewarm rather than hot and lost my first love. But I beg to differ. What I've rediscovered is the piety and deep love for Jesus of a grandfather's whose experience of that deep, broad, high, and lengthy love mirrored that of St. Paul the older he got.

Folks, I'm facing a horizon that I am much more aware of today than ever before. And as that horizon approaches, the hell-fire and brimstone preaching of George Brunk II and the condemning conformity of my home community, is simply receding in the light of the future glory that is coming into clearer view for me. And my goal, now more than ever, is to join the Spirit of God in excavating that Isaiah 40 highway so that as many as possible can come to experience the same love of that Spirit as I have over this past year.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

The science of race became the science of eugenics, which advocated for the elimination of inferior persons or their offspring through whatever means necessary. It was the science of eugenics that Hitler and his scientists would borrow, along with its ideology, to support and implement their extermination campaign. And it is the same science that has been used at times to justify abortion in this country. 

The seeds of the destruction of human life are the same--they came from the dismantling in Eden that would lead one brother to kill another. That seed continues to bear fruit in increasing volume these days, and the one thing that just might nip its bud would be the repentance and even reparations by the white church in response to the centuries of injustice experience by our Black brothers and sisters. But as long as statements like this are considered just political propaganda, the likelihood of such repentance is slim. And as long as the Sermon on the Mount is given the same short shrift, Jesus is unlikely to recognize an awful lot of we who claim to be saints on the day of his return. 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Over the past year, the church had a chance in the midst of being dismantled, to gain traction with God, to be re-mantled by turning toward God's loving face from which the Psalmist says we can never, never flee.

But we turned instead to Donald Trump, to the safety of judges on the Supreme Court, to a march on Washington D.C. in Jesus' name no less (talk about taking the Almighty's name in vain), and gave our attention and allegiance to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, theories ungrounded in reality, and demands that being unmasked is our civil rights.

And in the meantime, we called those who cared for the poor, who offered hope to those in the LGBTQ community, who opened their church doors as sanctuaries for immigrant children, who defended the brutality of police officers against African American men who have been justifiably running from the police for three centuries--we called these the culturally compromised ones.  Those who offered, like Jesus, a covering of wholeness and healing and forgiveness and grace and love--who offered the dismantled ones no less than a new divine mantle--were suddenly the compromised ones.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!