Luther for the Busy Man is once more in print, thanks to Ambassador Publications, which I believe is the publisher for the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations (AFLC). I can’t say I know much about the collection of congregations, but I do know this book follows the historic one-year lectionary as guidance for daily devotions.
Monthly Archives: January 2022
The Messiah: Revealing Jesus in the Old Testament
Filed under New Release
Beholden
Continue reading
Filed under Reviews
Enamored
Filed under Reviews
2022 Hymn Illustration Contest
I love Kloria Publishing and their latest offering is a 2022 Hymn Illustration Contest!!!
Filed under Contests
Liturgical Calendar 2022
I’m a little late on this one, but CLTS, St. Catharines, like many other seminaries, makes a liturgical calendar for pastors, altar guilds, and more to hang on their walls. The calendar contains liturgical festivals for both the one-year and three-year lectionary series. Anyway, if you’d like to print your own, they offer the digital file for free here.
I know I find my CTSFW calendar super handy, so I’m glad this move by the Canadian Lutherans helps liturgical calendars become more widely, rather than less widely, available, even if it means finding a way to print color pages. 🙂
Which reminds me, I may as well also point out two liturgical calendar options of a different sort from Lemon Creek Press: a free craft video about drawing the church year (in a pie chart) and a more detailed $4.99 Illuminated Liturgical Calendar which admittedly also needs a color printer.
Blessed Epiphany! Our family has some serious sniffles going on. Thankfully it isn’t Covid or flu, but I do hope my kids wake up with their coughs gone so we can go to service tonight!
Filed under Resource
By Kindly Powers
Here’s a neat find! A new translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem, “By Kindly Powers” (originally “Von guten Mächten), by Pastor Timothy Boerger!
Filed under Poetry
Never Leave Me (Waters of Time)
Filed under New Release
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees by Eliot
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees
T.S. Eliot
There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
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