An On-Going Imagination: A Conversation about Scripture, Faith, and the Thickness of Relationship

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has always excelled at making the Bible approachable and engaging. Drawn from a series of public conversations with Brueggemann and his former student and longtime friend Clover Reuter Beal, An On-Going Imagination explores Brueggemanns most influential biblical-theological concepts and methods: Why should we still bother with the Bible today? What is the purpose of prayer, and what can it do for our lives? How is keeping the Sabbath countercultural? What does it mean to say that the God in the Bible is a God in recovery?

Intimate, provocative, and challenging, An On-Going Imagination offers an enlightening introduction to Brueggemanns work for readers who want to learn more and a way back into the Bible for people who feel alienated from it by those on the right and the left who claim to have it all figured out. Brueggemann and Beal reawaken us to the fascinating strangeness of biblical tradition and its incredible power to help us imagine new ways of seeing and being in the world.

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of dozens of books, including Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, Journey to the Common Good, and Chosen? Reading the Bible amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Clover Reuter Beal is Colead Pastor of Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado. Previously, she was Associate Pastor at Forest Hill Church, Presbyterian, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Dean of the Cleveland Ecumenical Institute for Religious Studies. Her passions circle around congregational leadership development, gift identification, vocational discernment, and spiritual formation.