podcast
Conference is a Latin word about carrying: conferre, to bring things together. The documents that planned Bad Boll kept reaching for a different word — one with "against" hidden inside it — and the difference tells much about what the enterprise thought it was for.
podcast
Relief is a Latin word about weight: relevare, to lift again. Before the Missouri Synod sent Germany a single theologian, it sent $1.9 million worth of milk, clothing, and books — and a telegram its editors printed exactly as the wire delivered it.
Emergency is a Latin word about water: what is emergent is what rises up out of it. The machine that carried the Missouri Synod to Germany first broke the surface in 1932, on a letterhead, formed to save the Synod from its own debts.
Three hundred theologians came to a spa town to reconsider the Augsburg Confession. The name of the place is a bath; the academy that received them was three years old; and the house, it turns out, was Blumhardt's own.
He was born in Minnesota, raised in China, trained at a St. Louis seminary, and spent his life writing the history of Württembergers who left. Then he came back with an American army.
Thursdays at Bad Boll
The last post said the next would come in September. A reader in Württemberg had other ideas, and sent three pages that changed the book.
Thursdays at Bad Boll
A hometown paper in Moline recorded a young man's summer in 1953. Nineteen years later he wrote the sentence this book takes as its warrant.