Co-missioners,
Here’s some information you’ll want to know about, I think.
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor
for the Crossings Community
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Unearthing Hidden Riches: A Crossings Update
by Jerome Burce
I’ve babbled before in this space about the riches that lurk in our Crossings website. If only one could find them! That’s been a problem for over a decade, ever since our website was upgraded to meet the demands of the smart-phone era. Indexes from the original website weren’t migrated to succeeding versions, and when this failed to happen a lot of our content disappeared from view. Search engines could not compensate for this loss. How does one search for something if one has no inkling that this something is out there in the darkness waiting to be discovered?
From Canva
The key exceptions to this loss were the indexes in our online library that track work by Bob Bertram and Ed Schroeder. They afford a substantial overview of the essays and articles that these Crossings pillars churned out over the years. If you wonder as I have in recent weeks what either might have said or written on the topic of Easter, it’s easy enough to click on the links entitled “The Writings of…” and see what’s there. Or try the “The Sermons of…”and you’ll find thirty-six homilies by Bob Bertram, the rich and exquisitely crafted likes of which you won’t find elsewhere. See at the end of this post for a clip from one of his Easter sermons.
Not that all of either Bob’s or Ed’s crucial work is in that library. Far from it. Take their sermons, for example. Bob surely preached far more than thirty-six of them. Unlike Ed, he’d have taken the time to turn each one into an error-free typed manuscript—that’s my impression, at least. Ed tended to combine typing with scribbling. I recently thumbed through a standard file box crammed with sermons-by-Ed in this format. To turn these into text suitable for posting strikes me as a daunting task that no one is likely to get to. (Volunteers? Anybody?)
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This doesn’t mean that we’re short of Schroeder material to share with the world—or further work by Bertram, for that matter. Again I speak of lurking riches. Only this time I include a wealth of material produced by others after Bob and Ed concluded their work.
Our website is packed with a plethora of essays, reports, book reviews, and opinion pieces (some more vivid than others) that are clustered under the banner of Thursday Theology. Ed launched this as a personal project on May 14, 1998. Week after week he would email a screed of one kind or another to the host of friends, colleagues, classmates and former students that he had amassed along the way. These would then be posted to the original Crossings website. Ed kept this up with unfailing regularity for thirteen and a half years, until November 10, 2011—Luther’s birthday, as he paused to note. That’s when he hit the “Send” button on his seven-hundredth and final post.
A week later a few of his Crossings juniors whom he had more or less begged to keep the project going did exactly that. We’ve been at it ever since. By “we” I mean an editorial team comprising Carol Braun and myself in particular, with some early help from Steve Albertin, more help at a crucial point from Steve Hitchcock, and then the notable and ever so welcome addition last year of Robin Lütjohann. The output in our first several years was not nearly as steady as Ed’s. We returned to a weekly rhythm in 2018 and have stuck with it ever since. The key difference between our regime and Ed’s has been the abundance of contributing voices that we’ve featured along the way. Ours is the Crossings’ second generation, so to speak, now lapsing into a third. What we hold in common with Ed and Bob before us is above all else an insistence on keeping the distinction between Law and Gospel at the center of our thinking and also remembering what Luther said about sola fide and what Melanchthon said in Apology IV about the Gospel as a promise. So that’s what we’ve been doing or have been aiming to do. That the duration of our Thursday Theology stewardship already exceeds Ed’s by two years is, for me, a daunting thought.
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Ron Coulter
Director of IT
The Crossings Community
Comes the question: where is all this Thursday Theology material? Until very recently it was lost in the website’s cyber-brush, all but irretrievable. Enter Ron Coulter, our web specialist. Not so long ago he figured out how to assemble a list of all our ThTheol posts, organized from newest to oldest, a title given for each post, though not an author. For that one has to open the post.
I have already found this tremendously useful. Ed habitually attached clear titles to the posts he wrote. The same has been mostly true of the later regime. A scroll through Ron’s list immediately pops up items that grab the eye and beg for a click. One could not have found them otherwise. Those with a particular interest in Ed’s work will want to watch the dates. Again, Ed’s first post was on May 14, 1998. There he talks about the merits of “swimming the Tiber” as some, grieved with the ELCA, were doing at the time. Not surprisingly, Ed is “agin’ it.” His final post, on November 10, 2011, was sub-titled “It’s All About Faith and the Promise.” Click there and you’ll find—guess what?—a collection of thirty-three defining quotes from Luther.
All this brings me to the thing-of-things I want to announce and underscore here. Two months ago, Ron embedded a link to his Thursday Theology list on the home page of our website, www.crossings.org. You can find it easily on a desktop or laptop computer, though not, as nearly as I can tell, on a smart phone. On the desktop or laptop you’ll see a narrow horizonal red-orange bar stretching across the top of the screen. Look toward the right on the bar. You’ll see “Thursday Theology – all.” Click there. Let the fun flow.
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And there’s this too: I learned only this week that Ron has fixed something on our website that grants access at last to an archive of Crossings newsletters dating back to Christmas, 1995. I mentioned above that work of Bob Bertram’s is also lurking unseen on our website. Some of it is in those newsletters, especially the earlier ones. (The Lord called Bob home in 2003.) All of them will reward some poking into. The earliest in that list, the one from 1995, begins by Ed describing how this is the fortieth Crossings newsletter that he and Bob have co-written and produced. So yes, there’s work still to be found out there. A lot of it.
By the way, to reach this newsletter archive on a laptop or desktop, click on the “Publications” tab on the homepage, then pick “Newsletters” and scroll to the bottom of the list you’ll find there.
Thank you, Ron, for sorting this out.
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And yes, there are still more goodies to be found on our website. These notably include conference papers that were presented between 2007 and 2019. These came from a wide and international variety of thinkers, pastors, and layfolk who blessed us with material that contributed to Crossings and is worth exploring again and again. Unfortunately, it is not organized well enough on our website to make it easy to find. I hope one of these days to see a special link in our library that leads to a list of “Writings by Others” featuring the names of authors as well as their presentations. This would be one of many important improvements to our website—for which, by the way, we would more than welcome your financial support. Just saying. Stay tuned.
And with this, A Closing Easter Clip—
—from “But Now Has Christ Arisen,” a homily by Robert W. Bertram at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, April 26, 1989:
Speaking of laughs, did you know that a synonym for laughable is the word “risible?” It probably has nothing to do with the word “risen.” Still, that “Christ has now arisen” is enormously risible – not in the sense of ridiculous, though of course any God who operates by resurrections has to have a high tolerance for ridicule. No, what truly is risible about the risen Crucified is that he is God’s last laugh. And those not on whom the last laugh is but with whom it is, those who are laughing all the way to resurrection – who are they? They are the church risible.
P: Christ is risen.
C: He is risen indeed.
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Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
A publication of the Crossings Community
