If all inspirational books were like Kelley Nikondeha’s Adopted, we’d have a much a healthier church. Its piety is deep and genuine, its hope is tested by trial. If you are—or anyone you know is—struggling with fear, isolation, or forgetfulness about what makes for a good life, Adopted will bring you back to a better place...
The writer of Judges 19 begins by introducing his primary characters: a Levite who “took a concubine” and the concubine herself. The reader quickly becomes aware that this is not a happy tale. The union is not a joyful one, for already by verse two the woman leaves the man and returns to her father’s house. Finally, after four months, her husband comes looking for her, whereupon her father welcomes him with open arms and the two men join in drunken revelry...
I first posted this list five years ago on our old site, and it proved to be by far the most popular post ever. In case you who missed it the first time or are glad to have your memory jogged, here it is again. The rule I imposed on myself was that each book of the Bible had to be represented by one single, whole verse (no convenient deletions, like we do with the psalms in worship) but no more than that one verse (inspiring lines spanning two or more verses were out)...
Debates regarding baptism and “rebaptism” recur again and again throughout church history, as seen in the Donatist controversy in the early church and the conflict between Luther and the enthusiasts in the days of the Reformation. The issue has also troubled the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil. The difficulties were occasioned, specifically, by the practice of rebaptism in some communities under influence of leadership linked to the charismatic movement...
I am an experimental particle physicist, responsible for the operation of one of the largest experiments in the world: a fourteen-ton detector with one hundred million channels of readout to detect proton collisions at a rate of forty million times per second. Precision experiments, particles, quantification, and theoretical models—my workweek sounds rather cold and calculating. And on Sunday mornings, I go to church...
The matter of Luther’s reception in Ibero-America is corrupted. It is corrupted because Luther was never received as a thinker, a theologian, a linguist, or a spiritual reformer, but as a heretic, an enemy, a devil, and a disease. The principal concern of those who knew anything of him was to inoculate and expunge Luther’s necrotic, contagious cancer, whose very mention could ruin the unprecedented opportunity of ruling an orthodox land free of heresy...
“Apartheid” is an Afrikaans word that can be translated into English as “the state of being apart.” It was a system of racial segregation imposed on South Africa starting in 1948, when the main nationalist Afrikaner party won the general election. Apartheid divided the population into four racial groups: white, black, colored, and Indian. A series of laws passed in the early 1950s compelled the four groups to live in separate locations based on race.This system of apartheid was said by its supporters to be God-ordained...
Looking back on the twentieth century, two questions might be asked. First, why was there such a movement toward merger, and second, how did this whole process affect the course of American Lutheranism, especially but not exclusively the ELCA? To put it bluntly and directly, were all the efforts and energies expended on this process really worth it? ...
Called by some the “jazz of country music,” bluegrass holds a special place in the Appalachian region of the United States. Popularized in the rural American South following World War II, the initial working-class audience grew over subsequent decades to include fans from across social and economic categories. Radio audiences first encountered Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in the 1940s, playing country classics with a quick tempo and a high lonesome sound...
In August 2013 the Northern Illinois Synod put forward a memorial at the ELCA churchwide assembly asking the church to consider whether holy communion should be administered only to the baptized. Should a change in the administration of holy communion be recommended and implemented in ELCA congregations, it would represent a drastic change in current and historic Lutheran sacramental policy...
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...
