At The Crossroads of Lent

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onathan Franzen’s Crossroads and Gerhard Forde’s Where God Meets Man are two books that have little in common on the surface: the latest novel by one of America’s pre-eminent fiction writers and a fifty-year-old book of Lutheran theology, but there are affinities. Franzen’s novel is set in the early 1970s, mostly in the Midwest, and deals with mainline protestant Christianity. Forde’s is a book of mainline protestant theology written and published in Minnesota in 1972. While Franzen has said that theology was not his concern in Crossroads, the characters of the Hildebrandt Family find themselves repeatedly confronted by God and/or the church. It is this confrontation which is the theme of Forde, who believed that theology is inextricable from its significance for people — that God revealed himself “down to earth.”………………..