“…enlightenment rationality cannot make us happy…”

I think a lot of people know in their gut but have not yet thought it that enlightenment rationality is not adequate for a viable human society. It does many good things, like give us the capacity to fly an airplane or advance health care, but underneath that, enlightenment rationality cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We need a more elemental narrative, and of course I think that the gospel narrative is the one that tells the tale of security and happiness in a very radical way.

–Jana Riess interviews Walter Brueggemann for Religion News Service.

“…our increasing greed and our increasing anxiety…”

Horses and chariots in the ancient world of course had to do with armaments, the city filled with arms, instruments of self-securing, and there is no end to this either, because the arms must increase to match our increasing greed and our increasing anxiety. Many of the horses and chariots in the end, of course, are no longer to be used against external enemies but to patrol and guard the internal inequity, to keep the disadvantaged from appearing in their odd way to take a share.

-Walter Brueggemann, Using God’s Resources Wisely: Isaiah and Urban Possibility (1993).