Interrupting Silence Quotes

“Faith is both the conviction that justice can be accomplished and the refusal to accept injustice.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church’s propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of “male and female.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Since we now live in a society—and a world—that is fitfully drifting toward fascism, the breaking of silence is altogether urgent. In the institutional life of the church, moreover, the breaking of silence by the testimony of the gospel often means breaking the silence among those who have a determined stake in maintaining the status quo.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church’s action in prayer.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“It is too embarrassing to name and own one’s deep failings; as long as they are unvoiced, we may be allowed to pretend it is not so.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The old pattern of silencing served old-time religion, and old-time religion is in the service of old-time politics of domination and old-time economics of privilege. Strict constructionism and originalism are always in the service of old-time religion, old-time economics, and old-time politics. The breaking of that silence for women and for many others depends on Re-imagining, More Light, and Still Speaking. It turns out that these emergent new readings place everything “old time” in jeopardy.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The crowd always has a stake in pretending that the “abnormal” (in this case, being blind and begging) is “normal,” for such a recharacterization of the abnormal as normal precludes some from full socioeconomic, political functioning.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“It is quite remarkable that while Jesus reprimands his disciples, his engagement with them suggests that he believes that the disciples could yet be capable of transformative, emancipatory action. He believes that by the disciplines of prayer (holding fast to God) and fasting (refusing the seductions of dominant culture) the disciples could share in his transformative work. Without those disciples, however, no transformative power will be available, and the boy (and many like him) will be left in silent, hopeless circumstance.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“No establishment figure wants to tolerate affrontive poetry that exposes the failure of the totalizing system and claims it contradicts God’s will.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. “Pharaoh” reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Prayer is a refusal to settle for what is.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“We have seen in our own day in so many liberation struggles that the first cry for mercy does not succeed. The silencers are powerful and determined. Among us the silencers are the powerful, who have a stake in the status quo and do not mind some poverty-stricken disability, and those who collude with the powerful, often unwittingly.2 The work of silencing, like that of this crowd, is variously by slogan, by intimidation, by deception, or by restrictive legislation. Emancipation does not succeed most often in a one-shot effort. More is required.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The crowd, in its uncritical political engagement, is not always discerning about new possibility that comes with risk and often votes in fear for the status quo.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“To be “defiled” by empire is to be robbed of a distinct identity that permits freedom against dominant culture. “Fasting” as alert abstention may be the order of the day that will make the asking of prayers more serious and compelling.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“It is the silence-breaking cry that begins the process that turns pain into joy.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Breaking the silence” is always counterdiscourse that tends to arise from the margins of society, a counter to present power arrangements and to dominant modes of social imagination.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“As the church in reform draws closer to its core confession, it inescapably embraces its most radical vision that violates and contradicts conventional practice in its social context. What makes such reform difficult, moreover, is the fact that while we ponder the radical core claims of faith, we ourselves are variously enmeshed in conventional practices that are inimical to the gospel.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The story of the Syro-Phoenician makes women’s contribution to one of the most crucial traditions in early Christian beginnings historically available. Through such an analysis, the Syro-Phoenician can become visible again as one of the apostolic foremothers of Gentile Christians. By moving her into the center of the debate about the mission to the Gentiles, the historical centrality of Paul in this debate becomes relativized.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“Reeducation comes from voices that dissent from the unexamined comfort zone, from those who abrasively shock our comfort zones with voices from outside that violate the consensus that has been silently accepted.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out

“The cry that breaks the silence is the sound of bodies becoming fully aware of what the predatory system has cost and being fully aware as well that it can be otherwise.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out