MINNEAPOLIS AND COLLEGEVILLE, MINNESOTA (January 2015)—Liturgical Press, the Roman Catholic publishing house of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, the publishing ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), are pleased to announce the co-publication of One Hope: Re-Membering the Body of Christ, a resource to help Catholic and Lutheran communities walk together, recognizing and nourishing unity at a grassroots level.
In August 2014, six gifted pastoral leaders and scholars—three Lutheran and three Catholic—gathered for six days at a retreat center in the central Minnesota farmlands. Through intense prayer, discussion, debate, laughter, and work, they created a resource to help Catholics, Lutherans, and all Christians prepare for and mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. The result is One Hope: Re-Membering the Body of Christ.
The essays in One Hope explore experiences and activities that Catholics and Lutherans share and that connect to the living of their faith in embodied ways: breathing, eating, singing, forgiving, serving, and dying. One Hope will serve as a welcome resource for adult faith formation and parish discussion groups made up of Catholics, Lutherans, or members of other denominations.
“Due to the deeply collaborative nature of the process, the One Hope project really seemed to embody and actualize the kind of practical ecumenism that the book describes. Through entrusting ourselves to one another—not only in the intellectual work we did together that week, but also through our shared meals and prayer—I think we were able to produce something that was truly inspired and more than the sum of its parts. It was a unique privilege to be a part of this project and to experience the joys of genuine collaboration and fellowship and to benefit from the wisdom of my co-participants.” says Jessica Wrobleski, assistant professor of theology and religious studies at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, One Hope contributor, and author of The Limits of Hospitality (Liturgical Press, 2012).
According to contributor Julie Aageson, recently retired as coordinator of ELCA Resource Centers and director of the Eastern North Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, “The process for writing One Hope was extraordinary on all fronts: an exemplary group of collaborative colleagues well equipped for the task at hand together with a remarkable process led by BookSprints’ founder, Adam Hyde.”
John Klassen, OSB, abbot of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, described his participation in the process as “Amazing! What a wonderful group of diverse, pleasant, hard-working people on this project.”
The three other contributors to One Hope include: John Borelli, special assistant to the president for Interreligious Initiatives at Georgetown University; Derek Nelson, associate professor of religion at Wabash College in Indiana and director of the Wabash Pastoral Leadership Program; and Martha Stortz, author and Bernhard M. Christensen Chair in Religion and Vocation at Augsburg College, Minneapolis.
One Hope: Re-Membering the Body of Christ is available directly from the publishers. To order from Liturgical Press in print and eBook format visit www.litpress.org/OneHope or call 1-800-858-5450. To order from Augsburg Fortress in print and eBook format, visit augsburgfortress.org/OneHope or call 1-800-328-4648.
Contributor John Klassen, OSB is co-chair of Bridgefolk.