In Grace Abounds: God’s Abundance against the Fear of Scarcity, Walter Brueggemann explores our human struggle of having a smallness of mind that breeds competition and envy against God’s prompting to move beyond our small selves to trust in God’s ultimate provision and to extend ourselves to others openhandedly.

The Bible often associates God’s grace with abundance. While it is sometimes equated with forgiveness, more often grace is described much more broadly in the texts of ancient Israel: as the divine self-giving that stands against various forms of scarcity. We are bombarded daily with the idea that there is not enough of anything—housing, jobs, resources. By contrast, the Bible shows again and again how God meets our needs abundantly but in such a way that unveils our profound ongoing need for God and for one another. The first part of Grace Abounds lays out fundamentals of biblical grace by focusing on some of our most basic needs—to eat, to use land, to find shelter—and four different types of responses from people in Scripture struggling to survive experiences of exile and forced migration. In the second part of the book, Brueggemann advocates for specific biblical practices that are appropriate to the reality and experience of God’s grace and grace-full relationships with fellow creatures: keeping Sabbath, making doxology, bestowing blessing, offering forgiveness, and realizing reconciliation.