As soon as people understand what crucifixion means, the cross becomes offensive.
This is the third installment in the 1517 articles series, “What Makes a Saint?”
The Church speaks not with the cleverness of men, but with the breath of God.

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In the Bible, we meet the God who also does not prance around naked as a jaybird.
Symbols throw together a physical artifact we can see, hear, touch, taste, and/or smell, with a truth beyond the tangible.
To embrace our creatureliness is to affirm the truth that we were created to worship.
Strasbourg’s hymnals are especially relevant to American Lutherans because much of what we experience in our churches comes to us from Strasbourg.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Your God is Too Glorious: Finding God in the Most Unexpected Places by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2023).
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these early Lutheran hymns – and their physical availability in hymnals – in the piety of common people living in Lutheran towns and territories.
This is an excerpt from “Encouragement for Motherhood, Devotional Writings on the Work of Christ” edited by Katie Koplin (1517 Publishing, 2024) available for purchase today.
C.S. Lewis, Grief, and the Holiday Season
The following poem was written by Tanner Olson to accompany 1517’s 2023 Advent Resources, The Clothing of the King. Advent begins this Sunday.
The joy of which Lewis speaks is a deep yearning of the soul not unlike the nostalgia we feel upon seeing a favorite childhood object once again.
How can he say it? How can he say that Christ is after all the entire meaning of life for him, and that death is no real worry?
Lewis takes us to the planets to satisfy our cravings for spiritual adventure, which, as he says, “sends our imaginations off the Earth,” in the first place.