Incorporating the most current scholarship, this new edition also includes concrete tips for doing close readings of the Old Testament text, and a chapter on ways to read Scripture and respond in light of pressing contemporary issues, such as economic inequality, racial and gender justice, and environmental degradation. This introduction invites readers to engage in the construction of meaning as they venture into these timeless texts.
Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of dozens of books, including Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out, and Truth and Hope: Essays for a Perilous Age.
Tod Linafelt is Professor of Biblical Literature at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He has also served as the Cardin Family Chair in the Humanities at Loyola College in Baltimore and as the Alexander Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow. He is author or editor of many books, scholarly articles, and essays. Several of these have been reprinted or anthologized, including two chapters from his book Surviving Lamentations in the annual reference work Poetry Criticism, vol. 44 (2003).