Luther Seminary Library

Reflections of Luther Seminary Past

Can you guess what is shown in this photograph? . . . Give up? This is a view of the former Wartburg Chapel in Bockman Hall as it appeared in the 1920s. It is one of more than 40 of Luther Seminary's archival photographs of its predecessor institutions that over more than a century combined to form present day Luther Seminary. These images are now part of minnesota reflections, a state-wide repository of photographs, cartoons, diaries, letters, maps and more reflecting the cultural heritage of the state.

Do you want to get an idea of what the buildings on the campus of Red Wing Seminary of the Hauge Synod looked like? Or perhaps which young men were members of the Luther Theological Seminary Glee Club in the first decade of the previous century? Both these, and many other interesting glimpses into Luther Seminary's history, are available in this fascinating collection of material from Minnesota's past.

Minnesota Reflections is part of the Minnesota Digital Library, a joint project of museum, library, and historical preservation organizations in the state. During the spring and summer of 2008 the Archives of Luther Seminary worked diligently to identify and contribute these photographs of Minnesota's Norwegian-American Lutheran heritage to this worthy project.

Depth and Breadth

Our library has many of the qualities of a beloved sports team. We have heart. We have staying power. We have dedicated players. We have local fans—Luther students, staff & faculty, the libraries in our consortium (CLIC libraries and metro theological schools)—ands fans throughout the United States. The mailroom staff can testify to the latter; they haul a lot of the books we mail out to students and other libraries. We also have depth and breadth on our bench. This is true of the staff, also true of our collections (255,000+ books, 570+ periodical titles).

Part of our depth and breadth can be seen in the six floors of book stacks, the bulk of our collection. The other two floors (Levels 1 and 2) hold decades of issues from our extremely fine periodical collection. If you want to dive into a subject and hear diverse opinions on a topic we recommend that you look at what the periodical literature has to say.

The most current issues of our print titles can be found in our periodical room, where we have comfy chairs and the table with 10 public-access computers.

If you’re more digitally oriented, we provide access to periodical literature through our online databases. Good articles can be found in several places. You can read the latest in Time, Tennis, or the Harvard Women’s Health Watch (Look in the A-Z list). For solid peer-reviewed academic literature, search the ATLA Religion Database or Academic Search Premier.

Our website also features direct links to Caring Connections, a Lutheran journal for pastoral care and counseling, the ELCA’s Journal of Lutheran Ethics and Word & World.  We will be adding more electronic titles this fall; stay tuned.  

We have breadth, we have depth. Come explore our periodicals.

Reading Politics and Faith

--Will Keillor, Acquisitions

With the party conventions over and the election approaching, I have been thinking a bit about politics and religion.  Last week I heard an interview on NPR about the recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study that found that a majority of Americans think that religious groups should not speak out about politics (there are some other interesting studies as well you might want to check out while you're at that site).  The interview went on to a discussion of the separation of church and state and so forth.  The interesting thing was that the interview followed this MPR story which featured a religious leader suggesting:

it will take uncommon alliances, such as religious and business groups, talking to each other to agree on how to fix the broken U.S. health care system.

Of course, the first joint appearance of the two candidates was at Saddleback Church, home to Rick Warren.  Krista Tippett did an interview with the Warrens that discusses some of the issues related to the intersection of religion and politics (another site worth visiting). 

All of these things got me thinking about my own struggles to make sense of how faith and politics should relate, both in my own life in my community and in my life as a voting citizen.  If you've been thinking about some of these things as well during this political season, the library has a number of books that you might find useful in engaging with this topic.  Here's a list of a few relatively new acquisitions, some of which may be shelved in our new books area (by the way, many of them I found using the subject search "Christianity and politics" in our catalog, MARTIN):

	Title
	The great awakening : reviving faith & politics in a post-religious right America By Jim Wallis [foreword by Jimmy Carter]. HarperOne, c2008. Call Number: BV3793 .W34
	God and country? : diverse perspectives on Christianity and patriotism  edited by Michael G. Long and Tracy Wenger Sadd. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Call Number: BR115.P7 G567
	Reaping the whirlwind : liberal democracy and the religious axis By John R. Pottenger. Georgetown University Press, c2007. Call Number: BL65.P7 P67
	Religion in public life : must faith be privatized? By Roger Trigg. Oxford University Press, 2007 Call Number: BL65.S8 T74
	Why politics needs religion : the place of religious arguments in the public square By Brendan Sweetman. IVP Academic, c2006. Call Number: BL65.P7 S95
	Politics in the parish : the political influence of Catholic priests By Gregory Allen Smith. Georgetown University Press, c2008 Call Number: BX1407.P63 S624
	Religion in American politics : a short history By Frank Lambert Princeton University Press, c2008. Call Number: BR516 .L352
	The sleeping giant has awoken : the new politics of religion in the United States Edited by J. W. Robbins and N. Magee Continuum, c2008 Call Number: BR1642.U5 S6143
	Wayward Christian soldiers : freeing the Gospel from political captivity By Charles Marsh. Oxford University Press, 2007 Call Numer: BR1642.U5 M368

 

Tag Clouds: Both Sides Now

A church I attended at one time had a preacher whose sermons seemed to take an awfully long time to come to the point. As someone who had previously preached regularly myself, I was of course pulling for the guy, wanting to sense that he was connecting well, but it wasn’t always easy to stay hopeful.

The thought crossed my mind that preachers should either be given or (maybe better) to give themselves a quota of words they could not exceed in delivering a given sermon. This would dictate that every word used unnecessarily would at least potentially be at the expense of a word that was needful. A good way of respecting not only language but the attention spans of our hearers. Whether preachers or not, we can all benefit from discipline in the both the volume and the variety of words we use.

Now, I wonder if something like this might help us? A link from one of my favorite blogs (Instapundit.com) tells me that some clever soul took the time to use a tag cloud to look at the speeches by Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin at the recent GOP convention, right here in St. Paul. You can read the whole article, but the basic idea of tag or word clouds is “to represent a frequency count of terms in a given piece of text, providing a clue to the importance of certain ideas.”

If it helps shed light on campaign speeches, would it also work (dare I ask) on sermons? At least one website, http://www.sermoncloud.com , seems to be doing a roaring business, not only as a gathering point for sermons (in text, audio, RSS, etc.) but in sleuthing out the language by using tag clouds.

A question worth pondering: would I be more eager to try this out on someone else’s sermon, or my own?