Russell E. Saltzman

Growing up, I knew only one kid from a “broken home,” my best friend in elementary school. There was a thing about it, a shame that went with it and a pity I felt for him. Everyone else I knew had parents firmly married. He was an aberration. Graduating high school in the mid-1960s, and still knowing no one else from a divorced home, I recall my astonishment four years later, running into a now-divorced classmate… . Continue Reading »

An EECMY worship service . The Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (Place of Jesus) has severed all ties with the  Evangelical Lutheran Church in America  (ELCA), according to an ELCA press release. The Mekane Yesus action came during their general convocation meeting in Addis Ababa . . . . Continue Reading »

I am getting in touch with my inner gun owner, that primal part of my reptilian brain that says “I must weaponize.” Blame it on the Obama administration, I say. The president’s proposals of firearm abatement got me thinking: If I don’t get to a gun store soon, there won’t be anything left for me. So I joined the big rush and visited three gun stores last week but, dang, they were each nearly empty. I was too late. The gun nuts beat me to the cache… . Continue Reading »

I think we should blame President John F. Kennedy for National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers. It was his loose Cold War talk on nuclear survival that launched the doomsday survival business, I bet. He told Americans that if any of them expected to survive immediate annihilation from fire, blast, and vaporization in a thermonuclear exchange they stood a better chance of survival with a personal bomb shelter… . Continue Reading »

I do coins. One of my parishioners some years before her death gave me the coins her husband acquired on his many European travels. I just today got around to researching one of them. It’s from the Isle of Brechqa (also spelled Brecqhou), a small, small part of the English Channel Islands . . . . Continue Reading »

What would Jesus do? That’s pretty hard to say, but it doesn’t prevent people from speculating about it. The what-would-Jesus-do fad seems to have faded somewhat, but only after raking in multi-million dollar sales in WWJD bracelets, necklaces, lunch boxes, posters, Bibles, cross-stitching, cigarette lighters, refrigerator magnets, mood rings, and bumper stickers (I’m guessing he wouldn’t jump a left turn)… . Continue Reading »

Fr. William D. Lynn, S.J., age 90, died Christmas Day, his birthday. He was my instructor in sacraments at Pontifical College Josephinum in 1979 as I was completing my last year of study at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Ohio. We stayed in touch through the years following, both disappointed at the . . . . Continue Reading »

I remember Melisa’s mother grappling with her daughter’s death. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t try to make sense of death. We try to make sense of everything. We do not like not knowing, as if motivations, circumstances, some little sense of the casualties will help us scale the ever-elusive summit of “closure.” Some things make no sense and never will, not even after all the explanations have been made, as if anything in this life can close the gash of death… . Continue Reading »

The complaints and worry and agonizing anxiousness about the fiscal cliff and Washington gridlock have an alarming air of coming apocalypse. Phrases wafting around include but are not limited to “divided dysfunctional government,” “the worst Congress ever,” and “the grip of partisan gridlock.” The mixed election results”call them a political mulligan”have, many argue, set us up for more of the same horrible things we have endured since the 2010 congressional elections … Continue Reading »

Back in 1980 out in rural Nebraska I conducted my first Thanksgiving Day worship service. It was not a good week. Lucille had died the previous afternoon. I was at the hospital with her husband, her sisters, and her children when, at age forty-eight, she lost a three-year battle with cancer. For some little while before she died she had whispered the sursum corda: “Lift up your hearts.” … Continue Reading »