Spirituality

The usefulness of psalms of despondency

July 27, 2010

A useful prayer, this psalm of despondency, because the life of faith is not a sustained, uninterrupted series of triumphs. –Patrick Henry Reardon on Psalm 44 in Christ in the Psalms

Read the full article →

PrayNow: Treasury of Daily Prayer comes to the iPhone

June 7, 2010

CPH has released PrayNow, an application that brings the Treasury of Daily Prayer to your iPhone/iTouch/iPad. It’s a very reasonable $8.99. PrayNow works in a simple, efficient way, minimizing the amount of navigation; it’s as easy to switch back and forth from prayer office to the psalms/readings/collect of the day/etc. as it is in the [...]

Read the full article →

Singing and sadness

February 27, 2010

I was looking for this Luther quote the other day and couldn’t find it. Entirely unrelated, I was just reading in The Lutheran Study Bible on Job 36 and Serendipity! When sadness comes to you and threatens to gain the upper hand, then say: Come, I must play our Lord Christ a song on the [...]

Read the full article →

Mortification and Matthias

February 24, 2010

He exhausted his body by mortification to make his spirit subject to the Crucified. -Clement of Alexandria, on St. Matthias (from Pius Parsch, The Church’s Year of Grace, vol. II, p377)

Read the full article →

Comfort for those who are suffering

February 6, 2010

From tomorrow’s (Sexagesima) Epistle, 2 Cor. 11:19—12:9 A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me,“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made [...]

Read the full article →

Schmücke Dich, o liebe Seele (or, The enduring legacy of Lutheran Book of Worship)

December 17, 2009

Rev. Charles McClean recently pointed out to me that the version of Soul, Adorn Yourself with Gladness which appears in Lutheran Service Book (#636) has some disconcerting anomalies. LSB’s stanzas 5 and 6 are simply two different translations of Johann Franck’s original stanza 7 – the first is from the paraphrase in Lutheran Book of [...]

Read the full article →

The modern man's conception of God, compared to Luther's

October 24, 2009

The God of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl is no longer a consuming fire. If the modern man believes in God at all, he believes in him as the guarantor of his happiness. And so the thought of the existence of God has become, since the eighteenth century, a comforting thought. For Luther it was a [...]

Read the full article →

Book on Lutheran View of Depression now available

June 21, 2009

LCMS World Relief/Human Care is publishing a book by Pr. Todd Peperkorn on depression. The book is entitled I Trust When Dark My Road. I just ordered a large quantity to give away to all the members of Immanuel; if you’d like to order your own physical copy, click here; the book will be available [...]

Read the full article →

Treasury of Daily Prayer Workshop

May 26, 2009

Last December, I led an introductory class/workshop on prayer and using the then-new Treasury of Daily Prayer. I was asked to publish my notes from the workshop, which I never did; the current sale on the TDP reminded me of that. (Did I mention it is 50% off? Go buy it!) Here are some of [...]

Read the full article →

Portable Options for Daily Prayer Books

April 28, 2009

A friend I met on Twitter recently asked me about portable alternatives to the Treasury of Daily Prayer, as it can be too big to travel with. (I took my TDP to France in January – it fit nicely in my shoulder bag in the spot where my laptop usually goes.) I highly recommend the [...]

Read the full article →