Augsburg alum and friend, Dr. Paul Batalden, is always a source of important new books. Most recently, he pointed me to Paul G. Crowley, SJ’s The Unmoored God: Believing in a Time of Dislocation (Orbis Books, 2017). Crowley reminds us that God moves in our midst and in our history, and that the lack of familiar props or sure signposts are not reasons for doubt but calls to be ever vigilant to what God intends for us in our own dislocations.
In a more secular vein, I have historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new tome, Leadership in Turbulent Times (Simon and Schuster, 2018), her analysis of the leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – each of whom she has studied carefully over the last five decades.
On a more personal note, I am proud to let you know that my brother, Brad Pribbenow, who teaches and administers at the Lutheran Brethren Seminary in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, has just published Prayerbook of Christ: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christological Interpretation of the Psalms (Lexington Books, 2018).
>>Gratitude<<
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e e cummings
(in ‘complete poems 1904 – 1962’)