By the author of the forthcoming biography of Walter Brueggemann
Dr. Conrad L. Kanagy, biographer of theologian Walter Brueggemann (Fortress Press, 2023), is pleased to announce the establishment of the Center for the Study and Practice of Prophetic Imagination. The Center is dedicated to those saints and scoundrels alike “who have prophesized of an alternative reality other than the one that appeared in front of them.” Walter Brueggemann, more than any other in the last fifty years has pointed to the biblical text as the source of prophetic imagination. This new center will carry his legacy for the church into the future. The words of his breakthrough book The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 1978) spoke powerfully to pastors and a church in need of God’s alternative reality. That the empires had domesticated the church. That the royal consciousness had become the consciousness of the church. That a God who could exile God’s people in 587 B.C. for abandoning the poor could do so again today.
In a time when both progressives and conservatives are driven by different fears related to the empire, a prophetic imagination reminds us that even the empires are subject to God’s sovereignty. The Center for the Study and Practice of Prophetic Imagination is grounded in a commitment to the biblical text, in the confidence that God is sovereign, and that now is the time to respond with faith and not fear in what just may be a “Bonhoeffer Moment” once again.
The Center offers a weekly podcast and blog entitled “Imagination Restor(i)ed” that recently included theologians Douglass Meeks and Jim Wallis, webinars and courses, ongoing updates and behind the scenes stories of the forthcoming Brueggemann biography, reflections on the more than fifty interviews that Kanagy conducted for the biography, as well as previously unpublished material from the Brueggemann archives that Kanagy is currently curating.
Subscription to the Center is $9.95 per year and is available at Member Subscription.
Conrad Kanagy is a long-time sociologist of religion at Elizabethtown College, a retired Mennonite pastor, podcaster of A Church Dismantled–A Kingdom Restored that has 70,000 downloads in 100 countries and nearly 3000 cities, and the author of a highly acclaimed four-book series entitled A Church Dismantled.
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Contact:
Conrad Kanagy
Elizabethtown College
17176690074
[email protected]
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