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 […]
Farewell Sermon: Home Rejoicing
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 […]
Indulge Me: The Heidelberg Theses and the Theology of the Cross
“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 […]
Indulge Me: About the Lollards
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 […]
On the Way: The Last Enemy to be Destroyed
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 […]
On the Way: Poverty-Stricken Power
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 […]
On the Way: After Jesus College
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 […]
On the Way: Starting Again
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 […]
Separated by a Common Faith
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, […]
The Ecumenical Situation in Ireland
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 […]
High Church, Low Church, “Long Tail” Church?
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 […]
Anxious Exegesis and Immigration
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 […]
Filling the Crater
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 […]
Summer Church Convention Round-Up
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 […]
Teen Sex, Urban Ministry, and Missio Passiva
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 […]