Technology, it would appear, has the accelerator pedal to the floor. Only fifteen years ago, The Internet was a baby. Amazon.com was a new site, eBay had just been founded, portable digital music didn’t exist (the iPod was still 6 years in the future). In order to use the internet, I had to “dial in” […]

It should surprise no one that sexuality saturates American culture in the twenty-first century. Girls’ dolls are looking more and more like prostitutes. Seductive, lingerie-clad Victoria’s Secret models spice up the commercial breaks during prime-time broadcast television. Talk show radio shovels in the smut. Just the other day I turned on the radio and heard […]

This issue of Let’s Talk features essays by seminarians who responded to the invitation to imagine the church and the world they will be serving in the years to come. This is a difficult question to put to students who are immersed in what’s happening now — like, what’s on the next test. Asked to […]

I believe that there will be many new and challenging issues facing the church as we plow into the 21st century. There is the pervading post-modern culture to engage in, the rise of Islam to contend with, and economic hardship to struggle with. However, the trend that concerns me the most and will need to […]

As I checked a friend’s profile on a social networking website (a friend that I had known from Sunday school), his “religious views” caught my eye. He offered a single word: Why. His question illustrates the skepticism the church encounters as it seeks new ways to tell the old story. We preach law, gospel, and […]

“Our birth inscribes us as beings-in-relation to others. But we do not always honor that birth or those relations.”1 — Mayra Rivera Rivera While I traveled as a singer-songwriter and kind of artist-missionary, songs became a way to enter the stories of the people I met. I formed friendships within the prisons of Bolivia and […]

As someone who will celebrate his second year as a Lutheran on his first day of Divinity school, I find it hard to look towards the future of the Lutheran church when I am still grasping at its past. I can watch the Lutheran church divide over sexuality without the story of Seminex coming to […]

Attendance is down, giving is down; one could be forgiven for getting the sense that the Church isn’t doing too well these days. And nowhere is that more apparent than with our youth. I work with the high school youth group in my home congregation. The youth leaders at my church share a concern that […]