When my family moved to St. Louis in my teens, we went “church shopping”. It’s probably the only time that I’ve done this since I was relatively unchurched for much of college and then I was assigned my churches from that point on without much choice in the matter. I remember that we would go…

“The fightin’ Missiourians….” I’ll never forget someone telling me that our Lutheran church body was nicknamed this in the past. It makes sense. Lutherans can be a contentious bunch, it’s in our DNA. We told the Roman Catholic church to go fly a kite over indulgences, and we haven’t necessarily worked out all of our…

This comes from a question we received: “Why not use grape juice and a loaf of bread? Wouldn’t any liquid/solid food combo do?” So once upon a time, I remember this theoretical coming up in conversation: What if I’m with a church group and all we have with us is some grape kool aid and…

Little closet boxes, tiny little purple ribbon stoles, elaborate screens that hide collared men behind them, prescriptions to say 452 “Hail Mary’s” and 312 “Our Father’s”, starting off with the line “Forgive me, Father, it has been x amount of days since my last confession…” etc etc…. Those are the images that come up when…