The Crossings Blog

Co-missioners, Last November we introduced you to a new contributor, Dr. George Heider, adding the hope that we’d hear from him again soon. We do so today, in a piece that comes with a special introduction by Bruce Modahl. Bruce, a member of our current editorial team, is the one to thank for having brought Dr. ...

Co-missioners, Today we follow up Carol Braun’s reflection of last week with one by another lay writer, Chris Neumann. Both prepared these for a series of midweek prayer services that unfolded over Zoom this past Lent. The series was organized by our Thursday Theology editor, Jerry Burce, for the congregation he serves in Fairview Park, Ohio. ...

Co-missioners, Christ is risen indeed! So we heard on Sunday and will continue to hear for the next several weeks, with reminders aplenty to take this fact and put it present use. This week we see Carol Braun doing precisely this in a meditation she offered at a midweek Lenten service last month. Her topic was baptism. ...

Co-missioners, For the purposes of Thursday Theology, today’s topic is best addressed in essay form. As it is, we deliver it via yet another sermon, this one preached at an Easter Festival service three years ago. It’s not a standard Easter sermon. Hence our daring to trouble you with it. You’ll find little if any reference ...

Co-missioners, Today’s offering features Steve Kuhl probing a key question that surfaced in lots of churches this past Sunday through the Gospel reading for the day. This was St. John’s account of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, anointing Jesus’ feet. Steve observed in a note to us that the matters at issue here will resurface in ...

Co-missioners, We lifted the lead title of today’s post from the final paragraph of the essay it delivers. The essay’s author is Jill Peláez Baumgaerter. It includes a profound contribution by her friend, Rabbi Yehiel Poupko. Their subject is the Holocaust, or, more pointedly, the children it consumed.  Children were shot, bombed, and burned to death in ...

Co-missioners, This week Bruce Modahl reviews a little book by one of the most prominent American Lutheran theologians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. As Bruce suggests, it might prompt some interesting and profitable discussion in the circles you think and pray with. At its heart is a question that all of us are ...

Co-missioners, Were someone to ask for a definition of Crossings in five words or fewer, we might put it like this. “We push Christ.” And for clarity’s sake, we might take that one word further: “We push Christ Crucified.” There are many reasons for doing this. Today’s offering uses pew-level English to underscore one of them. ...

Co-missioners, Over the past two weeks you caught Ed Schroeder grinding his teeth about “the peace-and-justice mantra,” as he called it. Today we send a related piece in a different genre—so different that we’re obliged here to point out the connection to Ed’s work. For that we call on your familiarity with the six-step Crossings matrix. ...

Co-missioners, “Dust you are; to dust you shall return.” God saw fit to remind us of this in yesterday’s Ash Wednesday liturgy. As you read today’s continuation of last week’s post, you’ll notice how this word—grim, implacable—looms heavily in Ed Schroeder’s unhappiness with current church-based thinking about peace and justice.