October 31 of this year marks the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses. It marks a more modest anniversary for me as well: the seventh anniversary of the conclusion of the long walk Andrew and I took in Luther’s footsteps. The idea germinated back in grad school, when one day it dawned on my hiker husband that the great reformer himself had once been a hiker, too. Friars on pilgrimage to Rome were expected to go on foot the whole way (a ferry crossing was apparently the one allowable exception). Luther must’ve been a lot tougher than the portly portraits of his later years suggest...
Read moreExplorations in Martin Luther’s Theology—in Chinese
This book happened by accident.
In 2014 I was once again teaching an annual course called Studying Luther in Wittenberg. My colleague Theodor Dieter and I have led the November seminar (there’s also a March one) since 2009. It gathers Lutheran pastors from all over the world, about twenty of them, for a fortnight of intensive study in the heartland of the Reformation. We’ve had people from Senegal, Greenland, Myanmar, Colombia, and Poland—places you may not even expect to find Lutherans!...
Read moreIn Praise of "Please to the Table"
Esteemed readers, I am pleased and proud to announce that on August 29, 2017, I finally cooked the only two recipes I had left to do in Anya von Bremzen’s fantastic Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook. To cook my way through the whole entire book took only twelve years! ...
Read moreElisabeth Behr-Sigel and the New Hagiography
Yesterday, at last, I got to hold in my hands a book that has been a long time coming! A Communion in Faith and Love: Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s Ecclesiology arrives hot off Doxa and Praxis press, based on the conference on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s ecclesiology that I hosted at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, back in 2011. The conference felt a little bit like a secret meeting of the resistance. No surprise, I suppose: Elisabeth Behr-Sigel is best known for her theological defense of the ordination of women in the Orthodox churches...
Read moreBeyond Irrationality
I recently rediscovered the second theology book that captivated me. The first was George Forrell’s The Protestant Faith, assigned to my freshman Religion 100 class at Lenoir-Rhyne by Michael McDaniel. I read a few chapters and was slain in the Spirit, so to speak, with the unarguable conviction that there was no topic I was ever going to care about as much as theology… alas. And here I thought I was going to be a linguist. Anyway, in tears of equal joy and irritation I declared my major, and it’s been downward mobility for me ever since.
But the second book of theology did not provoke irritation or tears at all. It was Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season, first published in 1977 as volume 3 of the Crosswicks Journal series. McDaniel was more indirectly responsible for this one: he and his wife Marjorie let me have the run of their immense personal library and somehow I picked it out among thousands...
Read moreMistress of Divinity
Newspaper comics were essential to my upbringing; all the better when collected in flimsy paperbacks and anthologies to permit binge reading as opposed to daily patience. My mom had a stack of 15¢ Peanuts books that I pored over again and again and again. When I was eight or nine I collated every instance I could find of Snoopy's "It was a dark and stormy night" novel and typed it all up on our primitive word processor. I like to think that was one of the first signs of my being a scholar at heart...
Read moreThe Cost of Discipleship, Ethiopia Edition: Gudina and Tsehay’s Story
I had no idea when I met Samuel Yonas Deressa that we would become such good friends, or that I would end up visiting Ethiopia someday, and certainly not that through his guidance I would stumble across one of the most amazing, inspiring, and excruciating (note the word crux, Latin for “cross,” hidden there in “excruciating”) stories of Christian discipleship ever...
Read moreBiblioppression: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Library
Last summer I moved about 1400 books westward across the Atlantic Ocean and nearly half of America to my new home in St. Paul, Minnesota, after managing to shed about two hundred deemed extraneous. The first thing we did on arrival, before we had bedrooms or beds or any idea where our summer clothes were, was to build a bookshelf the entire length of the hallway at my in-laws’, whose home we have been gradually colonizing...
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