Post: Readers Respond

I was honored to get a letter from the editor of Pietisten in response to my change of address notice! Good Housekeeping, Yankee, etc., did not write us! What marvelous personal attention!

To find Land O’ Lakes, take U.S. 45 north to the Michigan border. We are 20 miles north of Eagle River, the Snowmobile Capitol of the World. We look forward to being parishioners of Tim Hawkinson!

Best wishes for a blessed 1995! Arnie Bolin, Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin.

Enclosed is my check for a two year renewal. Thanks for the great job the Pietisten staff does in giving us stimulating articles every issue. Roger G. Carlson, St. Paul and Bay Lake, Minnesota.

Thank you for a great year of what’s now my favorite periodical! Blessings for 1995, and think about getting larger reply envelopes. Peter M. Klauser, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We continue to read Pietisten with appreciation and inspiration. Thanks for including the sermon by Glen Wiberg — a gifted and inspired preacher. We had him for eight years at North Park, but not long enough!

As you know, Art Nelson will be the new senior pastor. That’s fine with us. He also is very gifted!

Greet our friends on the staff. You are all doing a really fine job — and one that needs to be done. Hobart Edgren, Manistee, Michigan.

When the mailman brings Pietisten, I settle down and relive the past days of the Missions-Forbundet, the days when we heard about D.L. Moody, D.H. Spurgeon and our own Rosenius and Waldenström. On his last visit to U.S.A., Waldenström was a guest at our home. In those days we sang out of Sions Basun and were confirmed in Swedish, of course. Those were the days when we listened to or heard about leaders like Skogsbergh, Bjork, F.M. Johnson, and many others. Then moving to Illinois, we were told many stories of the Covenant growing pains there.

Thank you, too, for the recollections at North Park — under C.J. Wilson, A.S. Wallgren, Helen Sohlberg, and even taking a course in philosophy from the master of them all — Professor Nyvall.

What’s so bad about getting old? From the past to jumping to the present day of computers and Internet? Mr. Editor, if you eat good food, watch your cholesterol, fasten your seat belt, and talk to God every day, maybe forty or fifty years from now you’ll have lots of memories, too. Again, thanks for the memories. P.S. Sorry, I got caught up in the past, but here is my check for more Pietisten. Rollie Paulson, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I noticed in Peter Sandstrom’s article on the rebirth of Pietisten, the observation that the Covenant apparently has had an “unrelenting swing to the right (with) its embracing of American conservative evangelicalism” too. Maybe that is why I’ve found Pietisten articles so congenial. My Mother used to despair of my faith, but it is not a loss of faith, but a deepening of it, and an attempt to make it relevant for our personal needs and the needs we see all around us! We are lucky enough to have what we laughingly call our little “support group” here — a retired Lutheran missionary nurse, a retired nun from the Franciscan Spirituality Center in LaCrosse, another dissident from St. Luke’s, and my husband and me — and find it is a group that is both stimulating and healing. Currently we are reading Jim Wallis’ The Soul of Politics, and while we always discuss our reading, we also feel free to air our problems and disappointments in the group. And it is always exciting to share the reading each of us keeps running into, especially when, at church, what we hear is (at best!) terribly predictable. Ah well . . . .

What a great article Penrod came up with in this issue! Lots of useful advice there, even if it is a bit late for us! The articles on Bach have been great, making me want to read more about the man. And I found the letter from Robert Thompson “on the mark” too — took his comment personally — “You, I think, want your cake and want to eat it, too. You seem to be a new breed of theologian . . . who are demanding a degree of piety that has only marginally existed in Christianity . . . Protestantism’s great promise of a spiritual re-awakening did not materialize . . . Protestantism today seems to be fairly gutted of its great essentials . . . Catholicism’s structure, coherent or not, will save it from disappearance. I am not so hopeful for Protestantism, as an institution.”

In an earlier issue, you mentioned something about one of your writers sharing ideas with Jewish friends. It would be interesting to have an article about that kind or inter-active communication. Might that be possible?

Keep up the good work. Pietisten is always a joy to read. Marilynn Ford, New Albin, Iowa.

Would I like to hear the collection of songs recorded by Christina Ekström (presumably from her recent concert tour of the Midwest)? It would be nice to hear this music sung well, genuinely . . . simply.

And how do I know about the existence of this other than from the pages of Pietisten, which still is being sent to me? What a strange little publication — do you ever step back and consider it? I mean, here’s a magazine comprised of unreadable theological commentary, sentimental reminiscences by aging jock-seminarians and quaint little ads for outboard motors . . . and, by God, it is all wrapped in a sort of feel-good piety. It’s New Age fundamentalism!

But, seriously (folks), I noticed a short letter in the last issue that I liked, in which the writer stated the comparative situation of Protestantism and Catholicism in the world today about as well, and maybe in as few words, as it needs to be. (A guy named R. Thompson in New York . . . ) I liked his description of the Roman church as a great beached whale.

There’s a generation of young pietists I have no close knowledge of . . . the sons of PJ, Zenos and any number of Carlsons and other Johnsons I can’t keep straight. Carl Johnson, Berkeley, California.