Item Type: Journal Articles

Versions of this article also appear in the following: ―Retrieving a Biblically Informed View of Children: Implications for Religious Education, a Theology of Childhood, and Social Justice,‖ Lutheran Education (Winter 2003):72-87; Journal of Lutheran Ethics (online journal, 2004); and ―Rediscovering the Dignity and Complexity of Children: Resources from the Christian Tradition,‖ in Sewanee Theological Review 48 (Christmas, 2004):51-64.

Marcia Falk is a Jewish poet, scholar, and translator with a deep love for liturgical texts – particularly the berakhot or blessings at the heart of Jewish prayer – and a passion for their continuing life in Jewish contexts far removed from the ancient communities that originated these forms. This article provides an introduction to Falk‘s work and to broader questions of feminist recasting of traditional liturgical forms.

In this article, I explore what it might mean to name Bonhoeffer‘s experience of the Christian life a “Christmas” spirituality. Both pieces were developed out of lectures given in fall 2006. This first piece explores Bonhoeffer‘s conception of the self and its particularity and formation, with reference to discernment, and was originally presented to a symposium of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning in Boston; the Christmas motif frames the piece for this ecumenical audience but is not fully developed.

This essay contributes to an invited panel reflecting on the future of the discipline of Christian Spirituality; I assert the necessity of an ecological perspective framing everything we do.

This essay makes available a central portion of Reading from the Underside of Selfhood: its tracing of Bonhoeffer‘s conception of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ through a feminist lens.

Explores the affective, even erotic, heart of Paul Gerhardt‘s (and, more broadly, Lutheran) spirituality through the text of one of his hymns: “Warum sollt ich mich denn grämen.” Locating the hymn within the traditions of mystical love poetry and communally embodied song, the article asserts that recovery of such hymns can provide an authentically Lutheran contribution, full of theological and poetic richness, to the repertoire of heart-focused worship songs so popular today.

Originally presented as a response to a lecture given by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 2006, this essay contributes in its own right to the conversation on Lutheran spirituality nourished by the last three decades of Finnish Luther scholarship around questions of theosis. It explores these motifs with a particular focus on desire, eros, and intimacy as neglected dimensions of an authentically Lutheran spirituality.