Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination

Description:
Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination searches through biblical scholarship, theology, economics, sociology, politics, ecology, and history to discern the strands of God's justice and reconciliation at work in the contemporary world. Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination challenges Christians to engage the most troubling social problems of our time by first drinking deeply from the well of the historic prophetic traditions. Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination witnesses to a God that raises up prophets to speak at critical moments in every time, and to what it might look like for the Church to nurture the soil from which such prophetic voices spring. Rarely do such a wide variety of authors from such different backgrounds and vocations get together to name what the prophetic work of God looks like in our midst. The radical justice and reconciliation of God can be found in every corner of life, if we know where to look for it; Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination provides some guidance in this direction.

Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination celebrates and seeks to build upon the legacy of eminent biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann's seminal work The Prophetic Imagination, first published in 1978, by assessing the core insights and themes he develops through a number of different lenses. These include contemporary biblical scholarship, theology, economics, sociology, politics, ecology, and church history. Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination also discusses the extent to which the Christian prophetic tradition continues to speak meaningfully within the contemporary world and thereby seeks to be a source for inspiring future generations of Christian prophets to do likewise.


Endorsements:
""The juxtaposition of 'prophetic' and 'imagination' refigures both terms. 'Prophetic' ensures that imagination is not facile fantasy, but concerns bodily reality that pushes toward justice. 'Imagination' ensures that prophetic is not one-dimensional social advocacy, but opens up the unutterable that must be spoken and acted. This collection of essays exhibits a wondrously generative perspective that links biblical faith to contemporary social reality. It is a welcome exposition of an urgent accent point in contemporary faith.""
--Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary


About the Contributor(s):
Jamie Gates is Professor of cultural anthropology and Director of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation at Point Loma Nazarene University. He is coauthor of Living Justice: Revolutionary Compassion in a Broken World.

Mark H. Mann is Associate Professor of Theology and Director of the Wesleyan Center at Point Loma Nazarene University. He is author of Perfecting Grace: Holiness and the Human Sciences.