Walter Brueggemann, In Memoriam — When the World We Have Trusted In Is Vanishing

Well, should we just go? Or Chris yes. Okay. Alright. Let's just do it. Do you have any questions for me before we start? No. I'll call you. Alright. I take off this loud bracelet. So where I start with everyone is, I just like to hear a little bit about the religious background of your childhood. Yep. I'm the son of a, a pastor. My father was a German evangelical pastor in rural Missouri, and I grew up in, very much a church culture. And, I think that shaped me. It shaped me, not only as a believer, but it shaped me toward ministry. Mhmm. And that was that's the flow of my life then. And, that was an antecedent of the United Church of Christ, so that's my home denomination and Mhmm. Has been all my life. Yeah. I I read somewhere that you remembered the conflict when your father urged his congregation to abandon German. Oh, yes. So it was a German speaking congregation? Yeah. Well, that that that crisis really came in the second World War when, you didn't wanna speak German anymore, but my father theological decision or what it was But it's like every immigrant community. The the older people really thought that, true theological talk could only happen in your mother tongue. Mhmm. And, my father then preached once a month in German into the nineteen fifties because the old people needed to hear those sounds. And, his insistence was if you don't if you don't move away from that, you will, like every immigrant community, lose the next generation. So, he had some tough nuts to crack about that. Mhmm. Did he speak did you speak German at home? No. See, the years when I should have learned it at home were the years when you didn't wanna choose German. Uh-huh. But both my parents from childhood were bilingual. Mhmm. And that's when I should have learned it as an Old Testament teacher. Right. Right. So I've been trying to learn it all my adult life instead of that. Mhmm. And, yeah. It's funny with German. I, I spent most of my twenties, most of the eighties in Germany, in Berlin. Was not religious. I was a completely political person. I was a journalist. I was with the state department. Then when a couple years later, I ended up going to seminary, which is not something I would ever have imagined in those political years. Yeah. Reading and speaking German was a huge advantage. Right? I could go to the library and get all these great texts and read them in the language. Well, and until maybe even twenty, twenty five years ago, the important stuff was still in German. That's that's changed now. But, yeah. Mhmm. I don't this may be a stretch, but when I read that story, it it it made me wonder if if that that struggle over language, you know, if it had anything to do with …