January/February Cover & Highlights

January/February 2022 Issue Highlights

A theme of childhood runs through the first half of this issue, starting with the cover artwork by Katelyn Garcia, age 8, granddaughter of Lois Knudsen Lund. 

We jump back a couple of centuries to the 1801 version of Jens Baggesen’s poem about childhood, “Da jeg var lille.” The accompanying English translation was published almost a century later. 

Then we hop over to Québec, Canada for a children’s story about two adventuresome dogs, Sana and Morgana., written by Bodil Jelhof Jensen. The illustrations are by Kirsten Petersen. You may recall that this pair offered a delightful illustrated story in the Christmas 2020 issue.

The message of “Peace and Love,” a song written and composed back in the 1970s by the Junior Choir of St. Peder’s Lutheran Church in Minneapolis with the assistance of Rita Juhl, is still relevant today. Rita describes the method that she developed for groups of young people to compose such songs. 

Ed Andersen includes singing in his description of church youth experiences in the years following the 1940 renovation of the Fredsville congregation’s auditorium.

A sermon for the last Sunday of Epiphany, centered around a popular children’s book, comes to us from Pastor Anne-Grethe Krogh Nielsen who shepherds the flock at the Danish Lutheran Church in Yorba Linda, CA. 

The second half of this issue makes connections across the sea, starting with Ed Madsen sharing the story of his mother, Signe, when she was a young woman in 1920 and working for a Norwegian family that had come down with a variant of the “Spanish” flu. 

Thomas Blom Chittick describes how the missionary work of St. Ansgar informed an icon commissioned by a congregation in Portland, Maine. This article is appropriate for this January/February issue since Lutherans mark February 3 as the day to recognize Ansgar, patron saint of Denmark.

Also appropriate for this issue is the article by Hanna Broadbridge about Queen Margrethe II of Denmark who marked fifty years on the throne this past January 14.

We end with another installment of the email correspondence between Joy Ibsen and Ann Becker to arrange for a Norwegian man to come to Chicago for surgical treatment of his aneurysm.

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