Stories We Want Our Grandchildren to Hear

by James E. Sargent · foreword by Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
• Published: 2015

Publisher's Description

A Journey In Imagination offers the hope of an alternative to a world convulsed by hostility and violence. Through an imaginative journey into Bible stories, incidents, and verses, the possibility of reversing hostility in both personal and communal life is explored. Biblical hospitality is neither a head in the sand nor a pie in the sky pleasantry. Instead it is the daring and challenging work of reversing hostility through seeing the 'other' fully as a human being. We may be failing at relationships, but that does not mean that we are doomed forever to fail. Too many of the tensions between the haves and the have-nots, between races, and between different religious traditions seem to have only two alternatives: violence and more violence. Life and relationships do not have to be this way. By exploring incidents that demonstrate alternatives to hostility, the book addresses this failure of imagination. This book is also a response to the accusation that the God of the Old Testament is little more than a God of vengeance and violence. To the contrary, the God of the Old Testament is the same God to whom Jesus prayed. Throughout the Bible, God yearns for a reversal of hostility.