‘Among the early responses to Brueggemann’s death Thursday (June 5) at 92, the most often repeated phrase is “he shaped me.”’ - Michael DeLashmutt, ‘Grief and hope: The theological legacy of Walter Brueggemann’. Religion News 5 June 2025.

“He shaped me.” Well, in a small but significant way that’s been my experience too. I’m not exactly conventionally religious, but something the theologian and biblical scholar Walter Breuggemann wrote forty years ago really struck me and has guided the way I’ve raised my children:

Just a few days after Breuggemann died, I rediscovered the following quote in an old journal:

Handwritten notes discuss Walter Brueggemann's ideas about families creating communal networks of memory and identity.

“Walter Bruggeman (sic) (1985) suggests that as members of families, caring adults ‘practice a peculiar vocation,’ the creation of a ‘communal network of memory and hope in which individual members may locate themselves and discern their identities’ (p.8). It is within such contexts that the spirit of our youngest children is nurtured and occasions of transcendence take place.” - Barbara Kimes Myers, Young Children and Spirituality. New York and London: Routledge: 1997, p.17, quoting Breuggemann, W. (1985) The family as world maker. Journal for Preachers, 7.

I still really appreciate that phrase:

‘a communal network of memory and hope in which individual members may locate themselves and discern their identities’.

It speaks to more than just the family, but I had to start somewhere.