Professor Heussi? I Thought You are a Book is an entertaining account of six decades of graduate education with the subtitle A Memoir of Memorable Theological Educators, 1950-2010. In personal encounters as well as in books, academic icons appear on the horizon of memory: Viktor Frankl in Vienna, Karl Barth in Basel, Carl Jung in Zurich, Reinhold Niebuhr in New York, Paul Tillich at Harvard, and the doctor father Roland Bainton at Yale. They are mixed with has-beens, upstarts, and other special professorial characters. In this memoir of Lutheran scholar, Eric Gritsch, these accounts are also fed with collegial encounters during his thirty-three years of teaching and research in church history at the Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary, with international excursions for Luther research and ecumenical dialogue with Roman Catholics. Ambition, stamina, and humor are ingredients that spike this cocktail of theological education of a native of Austria in the 1950s and 60s. Connoisseurs of anecdotal learning will find some satisfaction in this personal history of graduate studies in Europe and in the United States.

Journeying with Hope into a New Year: Reflections for Advent and Christmas originated in 1982 when our family lived at Tantur, an ecumenical institute between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. My wife Nancy and I sent family and friends a letter highlighting our experience of Christmastide in the Holy Land. Inspired by writing this message from afar, we continue each year to write a letter with family news, a moving quote from a hymn or literary work, and spiritual reflections. These provide the basis for thirty-one meditations to be read daily through the month of December. Each includes a biblical text, a brief meditation, and a prayer. These may enable readers to experience more than the commercialism of the season and be led to magnify Jesus, the One who is at the heart of why we celebrate Christmas or write New Years’ Resolutions. A line in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry summarizes a crucial idea informing this collection: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”