Category: Faith Questions
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God’s Word is Always the Solution:
A Letter From the EditorDear fellow servant of the Word, Has the ministry of our called workers changed over the past few decades? Perhaps it has in some ways. We certainly live in a broken world. That’s not new. It has been broken from the time Adam and Eve coveted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good…
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A Letter from the NPH Professional Books Editor on Doctor of Souls
Dear shepherds of God’s people, How many of you remember what we were taught on the first day in Dogmatics class as Middlers at the seminary? We learned that theology is a “habitus practicus,” that all (scriptural) theology is practical—it is for people (Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:15,16). Perhaps at the time we did not…
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Here We Stand: Teaching the Blessings of Our Shared Lutheran Heritage – A Letter From the Editor
Dear fellow servants of the Word, Our pluralistic society insists on blurring the differences between denominations under the guise of being more loving and tolerant. After being bombarded with this message for many years, we may all have loosened our grip a bit on why we are Lutheran. Some of the folks on our membership…
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Being “Quick to Listen”: A Letter From the Editor
“That was more meaningful than any baptism in a church that I’ve been to.” “There’s a feeling I get [there] I never got at church.” “It was those moments when she realized that she didn’t need religion to tap into that feeling.” I finished reading a helpful book yesterday, written by an atheist mother of…
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High Ground, Slippery Slopes, and Bottomlands (Part 2)
Haven’t read Part One yet? Find it here. Emperors and Elephants Someone once observed, “It only takes one person to produce speech, but it requires the cooperation of all to produce silence.”36 History has its share of corporate silences. The Holocaust, for example, will not be remembered so much for the extraordinary numbers of people…
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High Ground, Slippery Slopes, and Bottomlands (Part 1)
T. S. Eliot wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” How true. When conflict threatens to destroy us, we do our best to find a solution. But we do not always deal with our conflicts in the same way or employ the same strategies for untangling our hate-filled messes. In his book The Peacemaker, author…
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Teach With This Trait in Mind: Problem-Solving
This is the fourth article in a five-part series by Prof. Stephen Geiger, who teaches education and New Testament at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary, the seminary of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. No one likes to have problems, but everyone likes to be able to solve them. Endless conversations seek to solve relationship problems. Other conversations…
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“No One Believes in Sin Anymore”
If you have ever wondered why anyone would have wanted a nice man like Jesus dead, your answer can be heard, furious and shouting, in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 23. We call this scene the Seven Woes of Jesus. Savor the bitter words. Read the pathos and pain between the lines when Love got…