Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

by Walter Brueggemann

This converging loss that is beyond denial, concerning loss of political-military hegemony, loss of economic dominance, loss of social-ethnic singularity, and loss of ecclesiastical prosperity, has come to amount to a loss of moral certainty and a failure of nerve about the future. In sum, we watch as the world for which we had prepared ourselves and had learned to master is disappearing before our very eyes. That loss that touches every dimension of our common life is too painful to acknowledge. It can only be talked about around the edges, because the characteristic tone of public discourse among us is, perforce, upbeat, buoyant, and optimistic. Our political leaders are required to promise a recovery and a return to normalcy. Our moral teachers are expected to “get the train back on track.” Our military leaders are expected to promise that one more “surge” of troops or one more budget expansion at the Pentagon will assure continued hegemony. Religious gurus are appreciated for offering “six steps” to a vibrant church or any other quick fix. We are, by an ideology of exceptionalism, on every front mandated to entertain a return to well-being, dominance, hegemony. For that reason every U.S. medal at the Olympics is taken as another sign of recovered greatness, and every political leader must recite the casual petition “God bless America” — God bless “America more than any other.” In such an ideological cocoon, we are scandalized by Jeremiah Wright, in his daring truth-tel...