33. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America - Alice Kessler-Harris

The conception of law makers' (influenced by the overall societal attitude) views on gender roles in families affect how they distribute taxes for men and women who work, and also the development of social security. It is interesting to see how societal attitudes affect the rights of workers. [preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women]
The author shows the development of social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, showing the deeply embedded set of beliefs that had distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit freedom and equality of women. "Government rules generally sought to protect women from exploitation, even from employment itself; but at the same time, they attached the most important benefits to wage work. To be a real citizen, one must earn--and most policymakers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women were not, and should not be, breadwinners. Kessler-Harris traces the impact of this gender bias in the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair labor standards, in Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II."
-a lack of individual economic freedom for women and old assumptions up till the 1960s and '70s (but the break-down process is not complete yet)

P: I chose to read this book because of its title and even though it is quite a boring read for me as I am not knowledgeable in either US history, economics, or legislation, I found myself just reading over the names of policy makers and policies. The only part I could understand was the gender roles and their concerns about how wage-earning relate to the providence for families. I guess I was expecting more discussion about the actual settings in families and stories of real people in workforces rather than the process the policymakers went through.

1-9 October, 2017
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001

32. Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition - James F. White

White surveyed the nine Protestant worship traditions/distinctives/historical development using seven categories: piety, time, place (circumstances of worship), prayer, preaching, music (acts of worship, and people. p.16
-In trying to be a 'descriptive' instead of 'normative' historian, White did not tell the history of Protestant worship in terms of eucharistic texts/liturgical texts. "A liturgical theology that gives preferential treatment to some forms over others is highly dubious." p.15
-"People are the primary liturgical document." p.16
-piety is the traditional term for spirituality. p.18
-Place "We must look at the relationship of the basic spaces for worship: gathering, movement, congregational, choir, baptismal, and altar-table. p.19
-Tradition: we mean inherited worship practices and beliefs that show continuity from generation to generation. ...Worship traditions, then, are specific ways of and attitudes toward doing worship that are passed on from generation to generation. p.21

16th C. Anabaptist, Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran
17th C. Quaker, Puritan
18th C. Methodist
19th C. American Frontier
20th C. Pentecostal

The Reformation era:
-"The insistence today in many parts of the Reformed tradition on beginning all worship with confession is a good instance of late-medieval penitential piety still flourishing." p.27

The future of Protestant worship:
-"If convergence becomes too prominent, we must ask whether some of the richness of the variety of Protestant worship will suffer. The richness of Protestant worship consists in its diversity and its consequent ability to serve a wide variety of people." p. 212
-new traditions will develop
-"...when more study and research are given to understanding the process, all the churches will benefit. Very little has been done to conceptualize the process of transmission of the various traditions down to the present, ..." p. 216

P: I appreciate the author's look at the historical development of Protestant worship through the lenses of people: what they do and the circumstances (space!) because this is closer to what I am used to when doing research as learned in my musicology course. However, as a Christian historian, I find very little evidence of describing God's Hands in the course of how these evolved. The book does provide a good survey of the important key moments and charts the events and people that shaped the different traditions--whether by reform or by holding onto their central theological beliefs/interpretations. White also acknowledged how certain elements of other traditions are borrowed and incorporated into one, e.g. how Methodist hymnody are adopted by the Anglicans.

26-29 Sep 2017
Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989

14. A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music - Robert Marovich

Introduction

-What is Gospel music?

Gospel music was an artistic response to the Great Migration, one of the most significant cultural episodes in twentieth-century American history. Thousands upon thousands of southern African Americans who migrated to Chicago in the early and middle part of the twentieth century confronted economic, social, and cultural challenges that were bewildering, daunting, and disempowering.

The prejudice migrants withstood was in many ways just as insidious as the discrimination they experienced down South. Gospel songs, and the gospel music community, provided the catharsis and affirmation they needed to feel less like strangers in a strange land. Borrowing from the lyrics of Rev. W. Herbert Brewster’s “How I Got Over,” gospel music enabled migrants to literally “shout troubles over.” Wrote Horace Clarence Boyer, “It was . . . not unusual to witness a singer singing through her problems.”1 Gospel music was, in many respects, the only freedom migrants found. It offered them freedom from the daily indignities of being a black southern migrant in an unforgiving urban North, and freedom for a better condition spiritually, emotionally, socially, and—for some—financially. (p.2)

"The duality of the migrant experience—to cling to one’s southern roots while striving to be part of the cosmopolitan northern urban black culture—was never as evident as when gospel singers and musicians swung hymns and spirituals to the steady rolling beat of urban jazz or the Hammond B3 organ. " (p.3)

-While gospel as a composition style traces its roots back to the nineteenth century, Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley is considered the African American hymnist who launched the twentieth-century gospel music movement. (p.3)
-sociopolitical role of Gospel music in the African-American community.

-composers of Gospel chorus: Dorsey, Frye

First, gospel music became a way for African American migrants to express personal frustration with the class-preoccupied status quo and establish their place and status within the city’s church and social communities, even if it meant starting new churches.

Second, gospel music as developed in Chicago transcended denominational boundaries. 

Third, the gospel music industry grew out of the necessity for entrepreneurship among African American migrants. 

Fourth, like most styles of music, gospel music was periodically altered by the young.

a steady, incremental work in progress from the 1920s onward, starting with the Pentecostal

and Holiness churches and spreading into mainline Protestant churches

during the 1930s. (p. 6-7)

ROOTS

The Gospel Train is Comin':

from the South (New Orleans) into Chicago. As slaves Africanized Christianity, they brought biblical themes of escape and deliverance into their own repertory of slave songs and spirituals. They were especially attracted to the mournful long-meter, or “lining out,” psalms and hymns, in which a church leader recited or “called” a stanza of a psalm or song and led the congregation in a sung response. This practice, developed in mid-seventeenth-century white New England congregations in the absence of hymnbooks or instruments, was introduced to slave communities around 1750 by Samuel Davies, a New Light preacher. “Doc Watts” hymns—in essence, any long-meter hymn written by Isaac Watts and other hymnists—can still be heard “raised” or “lifted” by a deacon for congregational participation prior to a worship service in black Baptist churches (p.16). 

-the storefront church (p.23...)

"Belonging to a church that felt like home and sounded like home, migrants not only could move “up to a spiritual plane” but also were able to establish a distinct identity and sense of belonging in the unfamiliar urban frontier where both identity and belonging were elusive. On one hand, the proliferation of storefront and sanctified churches was welcomed by the deliberative Protestant churches because it helped ease overcrowding on Sundays." (p.25)

The Pace Jubilee Singers, Charles Henry Pace’s mixed vocal ensemble from Beth Eden Baptist Church in Morgan Park, Illinois, represented an early, and possibly deliberate, blending of the formal jubilee style enjoyed by the city’s Old Settlers with the urban vernacular popular music that appealed to the southern migrant. As such, the group is a fascinating example of African American sacred music in transition. (p.48)

-radios broadcast church services with gospel music

-the Gospel Nexus By 1930, the principal players in the gospel nexus—Dorsey, Frye, Martin, Jackson, and Butts—were in a position to transform African American sacred music, one church at a time. (p.86)

-Perhaps the most significant decision that Dorsey made in organizing the Pilgrim gospel chorus was to emulate the Ebenezer formula by offering membership to anybody who wanted to be part of the new group. Choir members did not have to possess any special musical talent to join, nor did they have to audition. They were welcome as long as they were members of Pilgrim and abided by the tenets of Christianity. Dorsey handled the choir’s musical training personally and taught supplemental courses on reading music.44 In many respects, Dorsey’s choir rehearsals were lessons in vocal training. Lena Johnson McLin, Dorsey’s niece, recalled that he insisted members of the chorus clearly articulate each word in a song so that the listener could understand the message. (p. 95) Making choir membership egalitarian had a sociological impact. It ensured that the gospel chorus was, like its music, for the masses. As such, the gospel chorus served much the same purpose as the new storefront churches lining Bronzeville’s main avenues. Both offered familiarity, commonality, and comfort to newcomers. Both were oases of belonging in a city where southern migrants were needed but not necessarily wanted. (p.96)

-Revivals: groups that sang in the rural southern tradition were in demand, because the success or failure of a revival depended on the power of the preacher’s message and the soul-stirring music. (p.98)

-"Take My Hand, Precious Lord": September 1932 Dorsey's wife and baby died. Frye took Dorsey out to pull him out of his despondency. => his magnum opus:

Precious Lord, take my hand / Lead me on, let me stand,

I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;

Thru the storm, thru the night / Lead me on to the light,

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home. (p.104)

-as a slow, passionately sung ballad. “Precious Lord” expressed a wellspring of emotion. It contained a more personal message than the songwriter’s earlier, more didactic gospel songs. [It] communicated a deep personal sadness, one that could be understood universally. Thus, when members of the Ebenezer congregation shouted, they did so out of empathy for Dorsey’s loss but also out of their own deeply felt—and perhaps deeply hidden—feelings of loss, solitude, separation, indignation, poverty, and illness. (p.105)

-Improvisation: Although radio was transmitting gospel beyond church walls, sheet music remained an important way to get new gospel songs in the hands of singers. Gospel sheet music, however, was only a rough guide for the vocalist. First, most gospel singers could not read musical notation. Second, and more importantly, the composer or arranger, and the gospel music audience, expected the artist to make the song his or her own by improvising on the original composition. In other words, no two performances of a gospel song were exactly alike. (p.118)

BRANCHES

1940s: Migration from the South continued unabated into the 1940s, with as many as two thousand African Americans moving to Chicago each month. (p.149)

First Church of Deliverance, Mahalia Jackson, Roberta Martin Singers (Besides being a singer, songwriter, pianist, and director, Roberta Martin was also a teacher. Romance Watson told Idella Johnson: “She taught us how to breathe. . . . She taught us how to present our songs. . . . She always said, ‘Be sure that you enunciate so that people will know what you’re singing about along with that gorgeous voice that you have. So you can get your song across.’ . . . She taught us stage presence. She just taught us everything.”63 Archie Dennis said to Johnson: “The Martin Singers taught you a way of life—how to be a Martin Singer. You were carrying her name. There were certain things you

just don’t do. You never smoked in public, if you smoked. . . . If you drank or tasted, you had to be sure of the person that you did it around.”) p.160; 

the energetic and mature-sounding Lux Singers

-As gospel music became more accepted in the church, the demand for new songs and arrangements increased. If the gospelization of spirituals and hymns represented the 1930s—Dorsey originals notwithstanding—the 1940s represented a renaissance of more-sophisticated gospel songwriting. The new songs were prayers and sermonettes set to music, sung with piano or organ accompaniment,

and delivered with a preacher’s force and conviction or a poor pilgrim’s supplication. The song structure of verse and chorus was borrowed from the standard hymn, but the vernacular lyrics spoke the language and articulated the worldview of disenfranchised African Americans throughout the nation. 

By writing, publishing, and performing the new songs, Dorsey, Roberta Martin, Theodore Frye, Kenneth Morris, and Sallie Martin established what historians call the Chicago School of Gospel. Together, they transformed Bronzeville into the “fertile crescent” of gospel sheet music publishing, sales, and distribution for the entire nation. The substance and style of their compositions

became the benchmark for gospel music in what Anthony Heilbut has termed its Golden Age: 1945 to 1960. (p.167-168) 

-Dorsey: his gospel compositions “went not above the people but into their hearts.”9 Indeed, the messages of Dorsey’s songs were so memorable that some titles became part of the church lexicon. melodies were accessible. (p.169) Dorsey’s rhythms tended to evoke the “natural flow of African American speech,” and the 12/8 tempo became as linked to gospel music as the Hammond Organ and the Leslie speaker.
-Martin and Morris Studio: publishing "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" (p.177)

-Post WWII Gospel quartets:

1945: After risking their lives to emancipate Europe from the Axis terror, southern black soldiers returned home from the Second World War to find conditions in their communities just as perilous as the ones they had left. (p.204) Chicago's West Side became a significant port of entry. "Of all first-generation Chicago quartets, none was as formidable as the Soul Stirrers. They were regulars on radio, received top billing at live appearances, and were ready to make a national impact on record." (p.206)

-Around 1952 and 1953, therefore, quartets started adding “music,” or instrumental accompaniment. The most common addition would be the electric guitar, but some groups also added drums, piano, and organ. (p.213)

-By the end of the 1950s, Chicago had further anchored its primacy in gospel music by being home base for most of the major gospel publishing houses as well as gospel artists of national stature. Record companies—Vee Jay in particular—were pumping out gospel releases. Nearly every nonliturgical church had a gospel choir, and many broadcast their music-filled services over radio.

But a tsunami of change was charging westward from Detroit. It arrived on the South Side in 1959, altering the sound of the Chicago gospel chorus forever. (p.259):

Second-Generation Gospel Choirs: The Voices of Tabernacle by James Cleveland: "Charles Craig and James Cleveland came out with a completely brand new idea of all kinds of contemporary chords, extended chords, chord alterations. Things the organ would do, the piano would answer, and vice versa. And a lot of jazz rhythms, where you had sevenths and ninths and thirteenths—Charles Craig could hear all that and incorporated it into his music, along with Beethoven, Mozart, a lot of the masters. Everything in music changed after that, across the country, to a point that no longer was it just the verse and the chorus, and maybe an extended chorus, and foot-patting and basic chords. It became extremely contemporary—it was a completely new sound. The gospel sound after 1960 became all choirs and big. ... Everybody had to be the “Voices of” because everybody was trying to be like the big choir from Detroit. (p.261-262) 

community choirs, church choirs...

-God's Got a Television (TV broadcasts 1955s..)

-"Tell It Like It Is" Songs of Social Significance: 

"Of all Chicago-based gospel singers, Mahalia Jackson was the most ardent activist of the civil rights movement and passionate believer in its leader, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her involvement with the movement began in 1956, when Rev. Ralph David Abernathy invited her to sing for an event to stimulate financial and moral support for the Montgomery bus boycott." (p.299) 

-the historic March on Washington. The march, scheduled for August 28, 1963, became, according to historian Taylor Branch, “a transcendent ritual of American identity. (p.301) Although Mahalia Jackson was to sing only one selection, the crowd shouted for more, so she did “How I Got Over” as an encore. In the tradition of the gospel singer setting the tone for the minister’s sermon, Jackson readied the crowd for (Martin Luther) King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, considered by many the greatest address of the twentieth century. (p.302)

-the fading of the traditional sound... The overwhelming success of “Oh Happy Day” was the natural culmination of an incremental transition in the gospel music field that began even before the 1959 Detroit Invasion. During the late 1950s, Leon Lumpkins and the Gospel Clefs of Newark displayed a flair for complex arrangements and distinctive melodies that predicted, and perhaps stimulated, departures from the standard gospel sound. (p.320) 

Youth have always been at the forefront of musical change, and gospel was no different.

-Regarding Amazing Grace, Aretha Franklin's monumental gospel album, Downbeat assistant editor Aaron Cohen notes that Franklin could just as easily have included original songs or reworked hymns in the fashion of the Edwin Hawkins Singers or the gos-pop of Ralph Bass and Monk Higgins. Instead, she drew from the golden age of gospel canon.29 Giving them her own touch, Franklin rendered gospel songs and hymns such as “God Will Take Care of You,” “Precious Lord,” “How I Got Over,” “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” and the version of “Never Grow Old” learned from Billy Kyles and the Maceo Woods Singers. (p.321)

13-17 February, 2017
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

P: What an interesting and fun read. Fun, not because the content is always happy but the author really tells the story of the birth of Gospel music in Chicago and the stories of the individuals who made Gospel music in an engaging way. It is good writing because as someone who do not necessarily have much contact with Gospel music or any of the names in the book, I found the reading breezy and compelling. I finished this book so fast and was left with a clear picture of the development of Gospel music in the last century.

9. Spiritual Revolution: The Story of OM - Ian Randall

'What are you believing God for?' p.10

'faith-filled' prayers for the world. p.13

-George Verwer's maxim: 'Faith doesn't have just Plan A and Plan B.' but also x, y, z. p.111

-the stories of Logos, Doulos, Logos II, and Logos Hope-how these special vehicles carried literatures and the Gospel to different countries, opening doors and even saving refugees.

a Global Organisation, leadership, training young leaders

Joseph D'Souza said: 'If we are not intentional about bringing change and transformation in lives and societies it will not happen. To love people is to act on behalf of them.' This emphasis was taken up in the OM theme--'transforming lives and communities.'. p.176

-Verwer read a lot, his reflections on how 'down-to-earth' spirituality was to be worked out in mission drew on an eclectic mixture of writers: Tozer 'reverent scepticism'; Lewis , writing on pain; Schaeffer & Stott, an understanding of a 'dynamic tension, a balance between life and doctrine; David Seamands, on healing damaged emotions; Steve Chalked, on direction in leadership. "Breadth contributed to spiritual balance." p.195

-Bonnie Penner & Gary Witherall: "I'd like to say, I love Lebanon; I love her people and my hometown, Sidon, I'd like to start by thanking the people from Lebanon and from around the world for their e-mails, phone calls, and prayers.
Some people may think that the death of my wife was a waste. Bonnie and I came to Lebanon understanding only a small part of the pain this country has gone through, but we believed that coming with a message of Jesus which gives hope, love, and forgiveness would never be a waste. This is a message for hurting people in a suffering generation. And this message is worth laying down our lives for."
"It's a forgiveness that costs me everything that I am, but I can forgive bc I know God, through Jesus' blood, has forgiven me. The blood of Jesus was poured out for the sins of the world, and when Bonnie's [blood] poured across the clinic [floor] on Thursday morning, she showed the same love for the women of Sidon.' p.197

9-11 Jan, 2017
Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2008.

5. The Prophetic Imagination-Walter Brueggemann

I. The Alternative Community of Moses
~The problem: -The enculturation of consumerism in our church today: "The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition. Our consumer culture is organized aganist history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now..." p.1
~Hypothesis of the book: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us." ...to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness/engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. "On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move."  "...to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give." p.3
-"The ministry of Moses...represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharoah's Egypt." p.5
"Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause."
-Breaking with (the religion of static) triumphalism and (politics of) oppression (and exploitation):
Moses discloses that Yahweh, the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes." "At the same time, Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion." p.6 "the emergence of a new social community in history, a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability. ...to match the vision of God's freedom." Moses' work "came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice." p.7
"Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the 'haves,' oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion." "we have split those two items much too easily but not without reason. The liberal tendency has been to care about the politics of justice and compassion but to be largely uninterested in the freedom of God. ...As a result, social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions. ...the tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression...The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God." p.8
"The genuine alternative, entrusted to us who bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is." p.9
-"Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power..." p.12
"Surely history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously..." the criticism of cry p.13
-Prophetic energizing. In this narrative, 1) energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness, 2) the LORD makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel Exod 11:7 3) "the great Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1-18) & Song of Miriam (Exod 15:21) are the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated songs in Israel. The last energizing reality is a doxology  in which the singers focus on this free one and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom." p.16
"Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology." p.17 The energy of Moses' doxology includes: "The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception. ......."
"It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible." "Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transifgure fear into energy." ep.18
-the Mosaic tradition affirms three things: 1) The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community. 2) This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality. 3) This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire." p.19

II. Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture
"his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible."
-Solomon's economics of affluence, oppressive social policy, static religion (accessibility of God, security "He had replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises had been reduced to tradable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely." p.33) as the dominant culture against which the prophets are regularly a counterpoint
-"Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality." p.35
-It takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition.
*Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.
*Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors.
*Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology. (p.36)

III. Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos
-"The imagination (vision) must come before the implementation." Poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. ...not the formal aspects of poetry but the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. "Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises."  p.40
-the royal consciousness-apathy, numbness, the absence of pathos (Eccl 1:7-9), "In the language of R. D. Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because they are no longer able to experience their own experience." p.41
-numbness about death; we are incapable of facing our own death. denials about endings. "we have no adequate way to relate to death's reality and potential, so we deny it with numbness." A symbol gap in which "we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of the reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced." p.43 "The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord." p.45 3 tasks: 1) To offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial. .. to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty e.g. the Exodus symbol. 2) To bring to public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there. use the language of metaphor, so that the expression can be touched at many points by different people. 3) To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion. the deathliness among us introduced in that royal garden of Genesis 2-3, wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management. p.45-46
-Jeremiah as the clearest model for prophetic imagination and ministry. Jeremiah's poetry-ministry of articulated grief.

IV. Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement
-"...it is the task of the alternative prophetic community to present an alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality." p.59
-"The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God." pp.59-60
-the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon.
-to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping that seems to have no end or resolution. by: 1) The offering of symbols that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable. p.63 "the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. ... The speech of God is first about an alternative future. ...the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God" p.64
2) to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there. lyrical. "speech about hope must be primally theological, it must be in the language of covenant between a personal God and a community. Promise belongs to the world of trusting speech and faithful listening. ... It will finally be about God and us, about his faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness." p.65 we are ordained of God to be people of hope. Puropse "to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God. ...Only a move from a managed world to a world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope." p.66
3) speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation. p.67
-The language of amazement: "The hope announced is not a nice feeling or a new inner spiritual state. Rather, it is grounded in a radical discernment of Israel's worldly situation. ...the comfort (Isa 40:1-2). New reality, metaphor of enthronement (Isa 40:9-10, 52:7), "Israel is in a new situation where singing is possible again. ...Change resulted from being addressed, called by a name, cared for, recognized, and assured. ...If the lack of singing is an index of exile, then we are in it, for we are a people who scarcely can sing. The prophet makes the hopefulness of singing happen again." & the poet knows well that the inversion to real power happens only by suffering (Isa 49:14-15)
-New song time (Isa 42:10); The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. ...The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. p.74
-Birth to the Barren (Isa 54:1)
-Isa 40:28-29 vs 30-31: "a critique of every effort to reorganize on our own, and it is a warning about settling in any exile as home." p.78




Dec 13, 2016-Jan 6, 2017.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. (Second Edition)

R: How can I relent control and management & sing a new song of the freedom and hope the Mighty God promised and the salvation in Him? To be free of the economics of affluence, politics of oppression and religion of immanence (praying to God only when I need his help?)

1. How Societies Remember-Paul Connerton

-to study the social formation of memory is to study those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible" (p.39)

-commemorative ceremonies; ritual as coded representation (Richard Wollheim's psychoanlaytic explanation); the performativeness of ritual (p.58), the formalism of ritual language (p.59)

-non-textual and non-cognitive: incorporating practices-habits/"habitual memory sedimented in the body" (p.102), bodily, less paid attention to in interpreting social history etc but should be more looked at to understand cultural histories.  

-inscribing practices-text, language etc-lots of attention to scrutinise its meanings etc

Habits-interested to read: D. Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: the Organization of Improvised Conduct (London, 1978)  -jazz piano playing, how the body learns over time how to play piano more smoothly

5-6 Dec, 2016; re-read: June-3 July, 2017
Cambridge University Press, 1989