Introduction: I am a Christian sociologist. (My conviction that that juxtaposition is not an oxymoron is something we can discuss later.) I am a member of Immanuel ELCA in Evanston where Frank Senn is my pastor. I joined the church some ten years ago to be nurtured in the naive faith I increasingly experienced in […]

In October Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) will be rolling off the press and into pew racks. By Advent 2006 Augsburg products will support ELW rather than Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW). That includes bulletin inserts which will include the new cycle of prayers of the day and the psalms. I’m not too concerned about the […]

Introduction “Gather the hopes and dreams of all,” sing any number of Lutherans every Sunday as they join together in the divine service. Though they be in different church bodies (e.g., the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America [ELCA] or The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod [LCMS]), still the common song passes many lips.1 No doubt […]

Introduction The planners for this Festival gave it an interesting title: What is the tie that binds? I take that formulation very seriously. When I first read the title, I tried to figure out what it was about. Note that the formulators don’t say, “What are the ties that bind?” Presumably they are asking for […]

20th century biblical scholarship was pretty much unanimous in the discovery that the New Testament from beginning to end was written from the perspective of belief in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The entire motive for remembering Jesus and writing down the accounts of his life and teachings, decades after he was crucified, was […]