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Up one levelPrayers for The Season of Lent (Series B)
Richard Bansemer, former Bishop of the Virginia Synod of the ELCA, and author of the ALPB's devotional books O Lord, Teach Me to Pray based on the Small Catechism, and We Believe based on the Augsburg Confession, has graciously provided prayers of the church for the Season of Lent, series B. All of the prayers reflect the lessons of the day...
Review of Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Meditations and Hymns
This latest in the massive Classics of Western Spirituality Series helps to fill in a hole in the anglophone world’s knowledge of Lutheranism after the Reformation. The three devotional writers featured here—Johann Gerhard, Heinrich Müller, and Christian Scriver—as well as the assorted hymnwriters were all seventeenth-century men, well after the Reformation but just before the flowering of Pietism. They held their own, Gerhard in particular, in the confessionalization of European Christianity, but, as editor Eric Lund is at pains to point out, that didn’t mean they were dry-as-dust concretizers of orthodoxy, penning erudite but irrelevant volumes on esoteric themes. Quite the contrary, living in one of the most traumatic periods of European history, and dealing with the fallout in their parishioners’ lives, they were very much concerned with the personal faith of Lutherans and how it was expressed in daily life...
Prayers for The Post-Christmas and Epiphany Season (Series B)
Richard Bansemer, former Bishop of the Virginia Synod of the ELCA, and author of the ALPB's devotional books O Lord, Teach Me to Pray based on the Small Catechism, and We Believe based on the Augsburg Confession, has graciously provided prayers of the church for the post-Christmas and Epiphany Season, series B. All of the prayers reflect the lessons of the day...
Good Friday and Easter in Christmas
In “Away in a Manger” we sing “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” but I doubt it’s true. And I hope it’s not true. It’s meant as nothing more serious than an expression of children’s piety, but doctrinally we don’t want to draw back an inch from the implications of the communicatio idiomatum, the full exchange between Christ’s human and divine natures. Anything less, Luther passionately argued, and our salvation is a lie. I am feeling particularly grateful for the incarnation and the attendant communicatio idiomatum this Christmas. At the beginning of December I had an invasive surgery that has left me still, three and a half weeks later, exhausted, bent over, aching, and weak...
Review of Parade of Faith by Ruth A. Tucker
“As church history marches into the twenty-first century, we find Billy Graham on the final night of his final crusade, March 12, 2006, leading a parade of sixteen thousand followers from the vast New Orleans Arena to Bourbon Street to claim the infamous French Quarter for Christ. Riding a motor scooter, Graham serves as grand marshal, as Christians lift their voices singing, ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ What a fitting climax to one man’s career and to a two-thousand-year parade of history! Problem is, the story is an Internet hoax. It is a reminder that even sacred history includes lies and urban legends.” So writes historian Ruth Tucker near the end of her remarkable nearly five hundred-page biographical pilgrimage through Church history. She willingly looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Christian history as she portrays many of the greats from down through the ages...