A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
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“In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.” ~Walter Brueggemann Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No in Culture of Now In the past couple of weeks, I became aware of the concept termed “quiet quitting.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, quiet quitting is a mindset...
There is a story in the fourth chapter of John's Gospel about a woman Jesus meets at a well. We don't know much about her, but we do know that she has been married to five different men and was now cohabitating with a sixth. We know she is languishing under the weight of crushing expectations and not measuring up to the societal standards of the day. Now it would be easy to assume that she must be in this position because she is promiscuous or immoral, but the text doesn't say that. You see,...
It was one of those appointments I wasn’t looking forward to. The confirmation program had made a big change and the kids and parents weren’t happy, to put it mildly. Tension had been building for months and finally had boiled over into open conflict. Ron, whose daughter was in confirmation, had asked to come talk to me. I knew the conversation was going to be difficult. He came into my office, closed the door, and took a seat. He immediately vented his anger, making his case that the kids wer...
In the Lutheran tradition we affirm the idea of now and not yet. This is particularly important as we bask in the post-Easter glow. God's promise of new life and resurrection has come to pass and yet it has not been realized in its fullness. We have the down payment, the first installment but the day is yet coming when all will be brought to fruition. We find ourselves in such a moment more than a year on from the outset of this pandemic. Vaccines are available to nearly everyone or soon will...
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." - J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Fellowship of the Ring" It's been a long haul hasn't it? Our "new normal" hardly seems new anymore, as we can most accurately measure its duration in months. Much of our lives seem more complicated, more difficult, and sometimes downright impossible. We see the number of cases climbing, our sch...
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. ~ John 1:3-5 As the autumn wanes and gives way to winter we enter a season of dying light. The days get colder and the nights grow longer. The church year shifts as well, to the season of Advent. To be sure, Advent is a time that looks toward the celebration of the incarnation of God becoming flesh in the baby in Bethlehem. However, at its core, Advent is also a season of deep longing for...
"Listening Point tells of what I have seen and heard on a bare glaciated spit of rock in the Quetico-Superior country... From it I have seen the immensity of space and glimpsed at times the grandeur of creation. There I have sensed the span of uncounted centuries and looked down the path all life has come. I have explored on this rocky bit of shore the great concept that nothing stands alone and everything, no matter how small, is part of a greater whole." Hello. I am Pastor Charles (CJ) Boettch...
