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Articles by Benjamin J Dueholm

Benjamin J. Dueholm is Pastor of Worship and Education at Messiah Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wauconda, Illinois, and the author of Brutally Ordinary Things: Sacred Practices in a Secular World, forthcoming from Eerdmans in 2018.

He has also written for The Christian Century, Aeon, Religion Dispatches and Killing the Buddha.

He's a graduate of Deep Springs College, the University of Chicago and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

Read more of Ben's work on The Christian Century

So What’s the Lutheran Brand?

August 23, 2022 by Benjamin Dueholm

Benjamin J. Dueholm August 23, 2022   Commenting on a recent spate of major media articles describing conversation to Roman Catholicism as a sort of trend in some avant-garde social circles, writer B.D. McClay (herself a Catholic) clarifies that while Catholicism is not cool, nor is it growing in adherents, it is a “brand.” That […]

Filed Under: Whither Lutheranism

Farewell Sermon: Home Rejoicing

November 30, 2019 by Benjamin Dueholm

Pastor Benjamin Dueholm Preached at Lutheran Church of the Messiah, Wauconda, IL on September 17, 2019. Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. I found some lost sheep this week as I cleaned out my office. Lots of them, actually, lost and hiding in […]

Filed Under: Lets Talk 2020 Tagged With: sermon

Indulge Me: The Heidelberg Theses and the Theology of the Cross

October 10, 2017 by Benjamin Dueholm

“The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” I can still remember reading these lines, the twenty-eighth thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation. I don’t recall what prompted me to open Timothy Lull’s Luther anthology […]

Filed Under: Indulgences, Reformation Jubilee 500

Indulge Me: About the Lollards

June 26, 2017 by Benjamin Dueholm

Please indulge me as I share my own odd Reformation-era enthusiasm: the Lollards. Originating in the work of priest and Oxford scholar John Wycliffe (d. 1384), Lollardy flourished as a movement for church and civil reform from the 1370s and the Peasants’ Revolt. After rebellions led or inspired by Lollards in 1414 and 1431 were […]

Filed Under: Indulgences, Reformation Jubilee 500

On the Way: The Last Enemy to be Destroyed

February 13, 2017 by Benjamin Dueholm

The works of Belinda Carlisle were preserved for just this moment: As the credits roll, “Heaven is a Place on Earth” sparkles to life; a sundrenched California is glimpsed in long view; in close-up, a dose of lethal chemicals course through an IV and a coffin descends into the earth, as the consciousness of the […]

Filed Under: Death and Dying

On the Way: Poverty-Stricken Power

July 3, 2016 by Benjamin Dueholm

Try as I might, I can’t find anything to say, or even really believe, about the Devil and the demons as such. Whether they can be said to exist in a way that we say anything else exists, and if so what they are, how they originate, and what their powers–I have no idea. In […]

Filed Under: Dealing with the Devil

On the Way: After Jesus College

November 15, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

However gauche it may be in clergy circles to say it, I loved my seminary experience. From the summer intensive course on New Testament Greek before my first quarter at the University of Chicago all the way to a course on John Calvin that concluded my last, lagging Lutheran year at LSTC, I enjoyed myself […]

Filed Under: Theological Education

On the Way: Starting Again

March 13, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

The challenge that faced us was hardly out of the ordinary: parents bringing their children to baptism, or adults coming on their own, wishing to know more intimately the faith they are about to profess, or perhaps have intermittently professed since childhood. Our particular congregation, like many others, was not really prepared to answer this […]

Filed Under: The Catechumenate

Separated by a Common Faith

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

Many things impede full fellowship between Lutherans and Roman Catholics: a history of conflict, theological disputes, and differing approaches to church governance, to name a few. In practice, a foremost impediment is cliché. Centuries of mutual ignorance and even hostility generated lowbrow and persistent images of the brethren separated by a common faith: crawling Catholics, […]

Filed Under: The Call to Fidelity

The Ecumenical Situation in Ireland

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

Saint Patrick’s Breastplate is a well-known prayer that has echoed throughout many centuries of Ireland’s history. It expresses the hope that Christ will be “in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that […]

Filed Under: Worship and Culture

High Church, Low Church, “Long Tail” Church?

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

Last summer I traveled to St. Augustine’s House in Oxford, Michigan for the first of what I hope will be many visits. For fifty years, St. Augustine’s House has been tending the thin flame of Lutheran monasticism, a phenomenon marginal at best within Lutheranism and practically unknown outside of it. Yet the monastery has fine […]

Filed Under: Hispanic Latino Theology and Ministry

Anxious Exegesis and Immigration

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

An experienced observer of public religion in America could, without reading anything on the topic, imagine the outlines of the unedifying theological debate over our country’s immigration policies. Recent attempts at rewriting immigration laws have addressed the difficult policy areas of border security, a guest worker program, establishing the status of those already here illegally […]

Filed Under: Hispanic Latino Theology and Ministry II

Filling the Crater

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

In retrospect, it was a mistake to be reading Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans so soon before my one visit to this year’s Churchwide Assembly. I must plead inexcusable tardiness: in three years of recently-concluded formal theological education, I never went deeper into Barth than a sermon or two. Reading the massive and […]

Filed Under: Churchwide Assembly 2007

Summer Church Convention Round-Up

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

Ah, summertime, when the livin’s easy, the cotton is high, and denominational bodies convene to regret, bestir, and proclaim. After the cosmic liturgical drama of Advent, Lent, and Easter, the over-churched among us must look to national meetings of Christians to supply the kind of sturm und drang that ordinary time seems to lack. It’s […]

Filed Under: Churchwide Assembly 2007

Teen Sex, Urban Ministry, and Missio Passiva

February 11, 2015 by Benjamin Dueholm

Each Wednesday during Lent, the churches of the Metro Chicago Synod’s south conference gathered for a meal, song, prayer, and a frank moderated discussion of issues of sexuality facing our churches and communities. As an intern this year at Bethel-Imani Lutheran Church in Englewood, it has been my responsibility to attend and participate along with […]

Filed Under: Ministries of Word and Service

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20.1 Lent 2015

The Catechumenate

19.4: Advent 2014

Communion and Community

19.3: Ordinary Time 2014

Green coffee beans (top left), Nicaraguan red beans (top right), corn (bottom left) and millet, vital Nicaraguan crops, held in women farmers’ hands

Food and Justice

19.2: Pentecost 2014

Latvian Wheat by Dace Kiršpile

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Religion and the Arts

1996 – 2013

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