Kirjahaku

This book is a study of the Lutheran Peace Fellowship (LPF), which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1991, and its impact on the social teaching of the Lutheran Church in the United States. Schroeder documents LPF's development as a case study of the relationship between the Church's "edge" and the shape it takes in the world. That pacifism has never been the majority position in the Lutheran tradition does not mean, Schroeder asserts, that it has been irrelevant or insignificant to the understanding of Lutheran identity and theology. Contents: Foreword, John Backe; Living Our Life; Doing What the Reformers Did; A Word That Matters; Where Is the Church?; A Community and a Perspective; Becoming More Organized?; Beginnings Everywhere; Afterword, Bonnie Block.

This book is a study of the Lutheran Peace Fellowship (LPF), which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1991, and its impact on the social teaching of the Lutheran Church in the United States. Schroeder documents LPF's development as a case study of the relationship between the Church's 'edge' and the shape it takes in the world. That pacifism has never been the majority position in the Lutheran tradition does not mean, Schroeder asserts, that it has been irrelevant or insignificant to the understanding of Lutheran identity and theology. Contents: Foreword, John Backe; Living Our Life; Doing What the Reformers Did; A Word That Matters; Where Is the Church?; A Community and a Perspective; Becoming More Organized?; Beginnings Everywhere; Afterword, Bonnie Block.

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on "city" that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, "In the Path of Totality," references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible across the middle of the United States in August 2017. The path of totality tracked part of a route I've driven many times over the past forty years on frequent trips between Chicago (where I live and work) and the Texas Panhandle (where I grew up), and the phrase calls to mind a philosophical question that has been of particular interest to me during those same years. It seemed to take on a life of its own when the eclipse was billed as "all-American" - and became in my mind shorthand for the kinds of nightmares I imagine Kierkegaard had about Hegel and his System. Some of the poems have appeared in earlier versions, but all have been reformed and made new for this collection, organized around a formal structure that is itself a subtle meditation on what counts in our presencing. Imagery is drawn from cities some readers will recognize - Chicago, Boston, Shenzhen - but always with an eye on the city scattered across the plains that I have come to see as the we by which I am.

Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who was born in Wichita Falls, grew up in the Texas Panhandle, studied at the University of Chicago, and spent many years moonlighting as a professor of philosophy and religious studies in the United States and China. This collection gathers eight public lectures delivered between 2009 and 2015 under the auspices of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago's Graham School. Schroeder approaches the lecture as scholarly work that is not simply academic, as a public reading-a performance-that weaves poetry and prose in conversation with participants who are coming and going. That makes it a kind of dance. All of these pieces dance about politics, place, poetry, and vision-with dance partners that include Emily Dickinson, Miller Williams, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Aristotle, Tina Turner, the Song of Songs, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Cornel West, V clav Havel, Saint Francis, Leonardo Boff, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, Zhuangzi, Robert Frost, John Cage, Percy Shelley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Laozi-and they begin and end by going home to Texas. The rhythm between going home and going away is the rhyme if not the reason for the dispersed city on which all these lectures dwell. The city is a conversation, and conversation is necessarily improvisational. In that sense, it is a sort of song that is subject to interruption; and, at its best, it takes up the invitation of "Simple Gifts" to dance wherever we may be, to turn and to turn-and to delight in the turning.