20 years of
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod since 1996
By Frederick J. Schumacher
By John A. Lang
By Frank C. Senn
By Benjamin Dueholm
By Gordon J. Straw
By Maxwell E. Johnson
By Frank C. Senn
By Frank C. Senn
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
In the end, the religiously-charged presidential campaign that many expected never materialized. The economy sidelined the marquee social issues of years past, a relatively secular Republican nominee kept personal faith largely out of discussion, a fiery black church’s theology was addressed in terms of race, and a fiery pre-millennial dispensationalist church was addressed, if at […]
No one should envy the task of producing official prose for the ELCA. As the holy fathers of Nicaea would no doubt testify, the drive to create or preserve consensus is no friend to language or theology. The proposed social statement on sexuality and the policy recommendations are the object of legitimate criticism and discontent, […]
A few days after the news that Augsburg Fortress was canceling its pension program, I was at text study with colleagues more senior in ministry than I. There was no complaining or self-pity in the room, but there was palpable somberness. No honest, sane person has gone into Lutheran ministry with the expectation that it […]
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 185 pp., hardcover. Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 185 pp., hardcover. Two of the most important contributions to theological discourse in recent years have come from the perhaps unlikely pens of a Marxist literary theorist and a […]
The number of Christian denominations in North America is unknowable, perhaps in the vicinity of 3800. Since we don’t know precisely how many inadequate alternatives already exist, the absurdity of introducing a new one is more philosophical than mathematical. The number of Lutheran bodies is more easily established. Valparaiso University’s index puts it at 28. […]
I have made two visits to St. Augustine’s House in Oxford, Michigan. The first was in 2006, after my second year of divinity school and my summer clinical pastoral education unit with a hospice care provider, and before my endorsement interviews and my wedding. The second, deferred for the sake of internship, the arrival of […]
At a church council meeting a couple of years ago, we found ourselves discussing friends and neighbors of our city church and their prospects for eventual membership. One neighbor in particular seemed like he should really be coming to church because, as someone observed, his brother is a Lutheran pastor. I spoke up to suggest […]
The new years walk, restoring Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring With a new verse the ancient rhyme T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I took a class entirely on the poetry of T.S. Eliot. I don’t remember now what made me so eager, […]
Some day I hope to preach on Deuteronomy 25:4: “You shall not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain.” Unjustly neglected by our lectionary, this verse is both poetic and, in its way, evangelical. Is there an earlier legal admonition to treat beasts of burden humanely while they are in the midst […]
Ruth VanDemark, our colleague on this journal and in our synod, died on June 9th of complications from breast cancer. She was deeply devoted to the ministry and mission of Let’s Talk, to foster thoughtful theological conversation in our synod and beyond. She co-edited our 2010 issue on “Environmental Theology” and was instrumental, though uncredited, […]
The phantom-limb sensation of parenting two children lasted for about a month. For over two years, my wife, son and I had been the family for a foster child placed in our care well before her first birthday. Caring for her was a great blessing and an adventure, though it was, not coincidentally, a daily […]
In his brief, astonishing novel Waiting for the Barbarians, South African author J.M. Coetzee imagines a town on the frontier of a nameless Empire, in a state of continual hostilities with its “barbarian” neighbors. As the story’s climax nears, the main character—a fallen functionary of the Empire—goes for a sunset walk outside the walls and […]
Running is the asceticism of our age. It is tempting to gape at the peculiar excesses of the Christian past; extreme fasts, lengthy silences, brutal penances and extravagant pilgrimages all feel very odd and distant to us today. And it is likewise tempting to wonder where, if anywhere, that drive to a seemingly superfluous discipline […]
During the summer of 2002 I owned neither watch nor cell phone. Indeed I mocked the notion: “Look at me, I need to know what time it is!” I would say in the voice of my pretentious watch-wearing alter ego, while in reality I was just out of college, unemployed, and rather short on social […]
How do we let people say “No”? In tandem with many churches, Lutheran and otherwise, my own parish has moved toward a wider, more explicit, and less qualified invitation to Holy Communion. This development has been more pragmatic than principled, at least as far as my own role is concerned. I am generally persuaded by […]