Shows / Thursdays at Bad Boll
Thursdays at Bad Boll
Eighteen Thursdays of documents from the Bad Boll conferences, 1948–1954, where the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod met the German churches in the ruins of the war. Each episode reproduces one document from the files at Concordia Historical Institute and asks the question it raises. A pre-publication series for the book Bad Boll: Missouri at the Crossroads, forthcoming from Concordia Historical Institute. Read by the author.
Episodes
Thursdays at Bad BollReformation Day, 1948
Erlangen, 31 October 1948: Hermann Sasse leaves the Bavarian church with an open letter to Bishop Meiser, written on the day the Prussian Union had chosen for…
Thursdays at Bad BollThe Professorship That Never Came
In May 1948 Hermann Sasse wrote President Behnken six pages on what Bad Boll would face: the long slide of the German territorial churches toward unionism, the…
Thursdays at Bad BollThe Fourth Film
At Bad Boll in 1948 the Americans showed films after supper. Three were about the Synod's work: Bible schools, the Walther League, the colleges. The fourth…
Thursdays at Bad Boll1948: The Augsburg Confession
Three days before the first seminar opened, Germany changed its money. Three hundred eleven German churchmen came to a Swabian spa anyway, to read the Augsburg…
Thursdays at Bad BollEbenezer
Ebenezer is Hebrew for "stone of help." It is also the name of a Welsh tune that two Bad Boll men turned into one of the Missouri Synod's best-loved hymns…
Thursdays at Bad BollDecide Between Boll and Sasse
Decide is a Latin word about cutting: decidere, to cut off. In February 1948 a cable from Stuttgart demanded a cut — Bad Boll, or Hermann Sasse in Saint Louis…
Thursdays at Bad BollBegegnung
Conference is a Latin word about carrying: conferre, to bring things together. The documents that planned Bad Boll kept reaching for a different word — one…
Thursdays at Bad BollThe Telegram and the $1.9 Million
Relief is a Latin word about weight: relevare, to lift again. Before the Missouri Synod sent Germany a single theologian, it sent $1.9 million worth of milk…
Thursdays at Bad BollEmergency
Emergency is a Latin word about water: emergere, to rise up out of it — what is emergent is what breaks the surface. In 1932 the Missouri Synod was going…
Thursdays at Bad BollBad
Bad is the German for bath. Stuttgart is a stud farm, Württemberg is a hill — and the town this whole series is named after is a spa, whose sulfur springs were…
Thursdays at Bad BollThe Shining Star of Materialism
He was born in Minnesota, raised in China, trained at a St. Louis seminary, and spent his life writing the history of Württembergers who left. Then he came…
Thursdays at Bad BollA Letter from Württemberg
The last post promised the next one in September. A reader had other ideas. Within a day of the first post, more than thirty people had subscribed; by Sunday…
Thursdays at Bad BollWhy This Series Runs on Thursdays
A hometown paper in Moline recorded a young man’s summer in 1953. Nineteen years later he wrote the sentence this book takes as its warrant. Why the series…