A friend (who kept chickens as pets) told me a profound observation: “If a chicken starts to look towards the skies, it’s a sign that the chicken is going to die.” He was speaking about a condition called wry necks or stargazing chicken which is a disease.[1] I was also reading John 17 at that …
“I couldn’t get Coldplay tickets” I moaned to a friend. “Why do you want to go? Aren’t you afraid of Covid?” she retorted. “You don’t even want to participate in church events, yet you want to go to a concert?” she remarked, exposing my hypocrisy. This Coldplay concert also turned into a political issue, with …
What are “Luther sites”?What do people do/learn on Luther study trips to Germany?This is what 28 Malaysians did and learned during the 2023 trip.
In my previous post, I told 5 stories from Eisleben. I wrote it as a commentary on five photos I took on the day we went to Eisleben. But there’s more to say about that day, Monday, day eight. In Eisleben we visited the residences in which Martin Luther was born, and in which he …
Drivers On the highway, our bus had to stop for nearly two hours due to an accident ahead. When we looked out the back of the bus, we saw the drivers had pulled up to the sides and left space in the middle for emergency vehicles to pass. So unlike Malaysia! Repentance There’s an anti-Jewish …
Today we attended the 10 am Sunday worship service at Castle Church, Wittenberg. The church building is massive. The congregation is tiny, at just over a hundred members, the majority of whom seem older than 50-years. The service was in German, but the liturgy was familiar. The church is the resting place of the corpses …
Did the reformation succeed in the city where it began? Read More »
Yesterday, we visited Hartenfels Castle in Torgau. It is now used by the government as an administrative building. It used to be the seat of “Elector John Frederick the Magnanimous.” In the 16th century, a church was built in it – designed intentionally to be “evangelical,” the watch-word of the Reformation. The design has a …
How did Luther design the first protestant church building? Read More »
We touched a metal plaque placed in the ground just before we left the Buchenwald memorial. The ambient temperature was 14 degrees Celsius. There was a light breeze. The guide asked us why the plaque was warm. We didn’t know. After listening to our silence, he told us there was a heating system below the …
Lutherans don’t make pilgrimage. But if they did, one of the sites on their list would be the room in which Martin Luther, in 1522, translated the New Testament portion of the Bible from Greek into German. The room is in on a hilltop, in a castle. The castle is managed by a foundation which …
As I said in my previous post, Rev Wilhelm Loehe trained women to be deaconesses, to serve people in need. His work was in Neuendettelsau, in the middle of the 19th century. Diaconal service was born in the church. As time passed, expectation arose that the care of the sick, elderly, infirm, and disabled is …
