Editor's Note: In 2020 BitterSweet featured renowned theologian and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann as part of our Provocation Series. Brueggemann's insights on the empirical nature of mainstream christianity and the counter-cultural posture of a rooted faith continue to reverberate. Brueggemann passed away in June of 2025, remembered for both his wisdom and his character.

I met Walter Brueggemann for the first time in January of 2000, though he had no idea who I was until that day. I had just completed my PhD four months earlier, and had been called to serve as Associate for the Faculty at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, where Walter had taught for more than a decade. I arrived eager, earnest, and acutely aware of my youth. My very first major assignment was to oversee a complete overhaul of the seminary’s course evaluation forms for the entire faculty. The existing evaluations were outdated and largely impressionistic. The new forms were designed with care, grounded in educational learning theory, and oriented toward measurable learning outcomes. A faculty committee worked hard on them and, after months of discussion, approved the design and scheduled it for presentation to the full faculty.
 
There was just one coincidence, one I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Walter was on sabbatical leave fall of 1999. He had not been part of the conversations. The faculty meeting in January, when the new evaluations were formally presented, was his first meeting back. It was also the first time he had heard about the changes. And Walter was not pleased. He was, in fact, furious. He launched into a blistering critique of the new forms, what they represented, what they risked, what they betrayed about the vocation of teaching and the imagination of theological education. His voice filled the room. The President was there. The deans were there. I was there, sitting quietly off to the side, feeling my stomach drop with each sentence. I was stunned and embarrassed. I believed in the work we had done. I believed the changes were good and faithful. And yet here was Walter Brueggemann, thundering against them in a room full of people whose respect mattered deeply to me. The forms were approved anyway, and the meeting moved on. I went home that night, though, feeling small, chastened, and unsure what all this meant.
 
The next morning, Walter walked into the academic dean’s office, where I worked. He gathered everyone—the administrative assistant, the registrar, the vice president for academic affairs, and me—and he apologized. He said plainly that his behavior at the faculty meeting had been completely out of line. That his rant was inappropriate. That he had spoken out of anger rather than care. And then he turned to me, apologized directly, and asked if I would join him for lunch that day. Of course, I said yes. I assumed this lunch was his way of making amends.
 
Only later did I learn that Walter had a quiet, consistent, and largely invisible practice. Whenever a new employee joined the seminary, regardless of role or status, he took them to lunch within their first few weeks. This was simply his habit, and this lunch was mine (delayed only because he had been away). That apology and lunch changed my understanding of leadership forever. Walter did not walk back his convictions. He did not suddenly agree with the evaluation forms. But he showed me something far more important: that authority does not excuse cruelty, that brilliance does not absolve us from accountability, and that repair—real repair—is possible even after public failure. Prophetic imagination, I learned that day, is not groundless optimism, it is the willingness to tell the truth, to apologize for behavior without hedging on conviction, and to keep showing up to the table together.