Hopeful imagination

Recently two people mentioned Walter Brueggemann's book Hopeful Imagination. I knew I owned it so I've started re-reading it. Written in 1986 it is surprisingly, and somewhat shockingly, pertinent to what we see in the world and in the church today. I'm still in the first of the three sections of the book focussed on Jeremiah and his prophetic awareness of the coming exile and the destruction of Jerusalem. Both political and religious security were at stake.

"Jeremiah lived in a time of turmoil. He believed it was a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition. He watched his world dying and he felt pain. What pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to notice, to care, to acknowledge or to admit. He could not determine whether they were too stupid to understand, or whether they were so dishonest that they understood but engaged in an enormous cover up. He could not determine whether it was a grand public deception or a pitiful self-deception. But he watched. The dying seemed so clear, so inexorable. Yet they denied. In different moments, he indicts his people of both stupidity (4:22) and stubbornness (18:12)"