Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: The Prayers of Walter Brueggemann

by Walter Brueggemann, Edwin Searcy

Overview

This thoughtful collection of prayers emerged from Brueggemann's thirty-five years of teaching in seminaries. Full of reflection, faith, and dialogue, they reveal another side of this gifted author from what his many readers are accustomed to. These deeply felt and sparklingly articulated prayers reflect a wide range of life experiences. As readers, we are taken from the depths of pain and loss to the heights of joy and praise. The author takes on life in its fullest as he utters his praise and lament, petition and thanksgiving. Brueggemann's prayers lead us to deeper commitment, deeper faith, and deeper reflection. The volume also includes an index of biblical allusions that will be useful for preachers as well as the general reader looking for the biblical roots of these fears, hopes, struggles, and aspirations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780800634605
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	01/15/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.52(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.62(d)

Table of Contents

The prayers are grouped into nine categories:
"And Then You"-Facing God
"A People with Many Secrets"-Truth-telling Confession
"Against Your Absence"-A Hidden God
"We Are Ready to Listen"-For Illumination
"Move Off the Page"-While Reading Texts
"Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth"-For the Church in Mission
"Start Again"-For a Bruised World
"We Will Not Keep Silent"-Cadences of Gratitude
"Occupy Our Calendars"-Praying the Christian Year

Editorial Reviews

Walter Brueggemann, whose thoughtful and reflective works on the Hebrew Bible have ensured that the term "Old Testament theologian" is not an oxymoron, offers distilled wisdom from his 35 years of teaching in Awed to Heaven, Rooted to Earth. At the seminaries where he has taught, professors traditionally open their classes with prayer-a practice that for some might devolve into a quick nod to convention, but Brueggemann has always presented the opportunity to involve students more intimately in the assigned biblical texts. This marvelous little book of Brueggemann's start-of-class prayers will have readers cheering, especially when he writes that "much public prayer in the church is careless and slovenly, and... what passes for spontaneity is in fact a lack of preparation."

Publishers Weekly

Brueggemann (Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA) is a classic in his own right. His Theology of the Old Testament is widely read in many seminaries, and his Old Testament studies and original theology are closely followed. This is the first collection of his original prayers, and as such it is likely to be as attentively read as his previous works. Brueggmann's keen and sensitive intelligence is not best displayed here, and his ear for language in these prayers, typographically set out as though they were poems, is better than tin but not golden. Still, these prayers are the sincere outpourings of a man of deep faith, and his theology in them is of a piece with that in his earlier celebrated works. For most collections. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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