The category “Lutheran immigrant maritime disasters” is mercifully small, but the category is a limited method of accounting. Three shipwrecks could mean some missing timber or a thousand lives, pathetic mishaps or tragic crimes, inspiration or smothering sadness, goofy hijinks or wrenching laments. In the category at hand, we find some of each...
Elisabeth Fedde’s life falls neatly into distinct parts, each with its own geography and a distinct identity, except for an awkward transitional period on her return to Norway from the United States, a sort of intermezzo before the Fourth Act...
When my wife Erna and I arrived at Luther Place in the the winter of 1970, the 14th Street situation was chaotic: drug pushers, pimps, hundreds of prostitutes, homeless ill. It was difficult to get to the front door of the church. The fragrance of tear gas from anti-Vietnam War demonstrations hung over Thomas Circle. Every morning I’d pick up empty bottles of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose and heroin needles, just to clean up the area before services. In the midst of this Washington, DC, asphalt desert was Luther Place, a church that was threatened. Yet it was exactly the place of greatest promise. It was where Jesus would most likely appear...
The verbs of the resurrection, ἐγείρω and ἀνίστημι, are modest verbs. They can function in quite ordinary fashion: one can raise stones or a horn of salvation in the same way that the Father raises the Son; one can rise from sitting the same way Jesus rises from the tomb. That’s why ἐκ νεκρῶν (ek nekrōn, “from the dead”) follows both verbs so often—there’s no self-evident reason to see the miracle otherwise...
You must read this book. I have never said that about any book I’ve reviewed, and rarely at all. Rarer still is there a book of seven hundred pages that should not have been a single page shorter and never leaves the reader bored for a moment. If this is the only book of theology you read in your life, or the last book of theology in your life, it is enough...
I’m still a bit stunned that it’s actually 2017. We’ve been building up to this anniversary for so long, and now it’s just a few months until the exact 500th anniversary of the 95 Theses. The language to refer to this anniversary is telling in itself: we far more often say that it’s the anniversary of “the Reformation” or “the beginning of the Reformation” than of the Ninety-Five Theses. But why, exactly, does “the Reformation” begin with the Ninety-Five Theses...?
More than a decade ago I spent a brief year serving on the ELCA’s sexuality task force. That awkward service came to an end when I accepted the editorship of LF, as I felt that it would be difficult for me both to head up an independent (and not infrequently critical) journal of American Lutheranism while participating in a highly controversial process that required discretion for the duration. I have no illusions that my staying on would have made any difference to the outcome...
