Hope against Dominant Despair...

I was directed to this video from a good friend of mine. As I watched, I was reminded of some work by Walter Brueggemann, a favorite Old Testament scholar, who describes the task of the church to with three moves in our contemporary cultural climate: (1) to mediate a memory of generosity in the face of a dominate culture of amnesia (because our culture says what is past is over and done, importing the past into the present is devalued and delegitimated in a culture that prizes the new); (2) to mediate hope of utter fidelity into all futures in a dominate text of despair (it is difficult to deny that our culture and its power brokers thrive on propagating narratives of fear and despair, rather than hope in our closed, limited goods world, both economic and interpersonal); and (3) mediate and embody covenantal neighborliness in the face of dominant anxious selfishness and alienated greed.

While I know that there is a strong appeal to pathos here, I am amazed at how this video instilled some of these very feelings, emotions, and convictions in me. It is worth the 4 minutes.