Award-winning author, professor, pastor, broadcaster, and speaker Walter Wangerin Jr., 77, died August 5. He was Emil and Elfriede Jochum Professor and writer-in-residence at Valparaiso University.
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Wangerin won the National Book Award, The New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year Award, and several Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion Awards, including for The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel (Zondervan, 1998) and Paul: A Novel (Zondervan, 2001).
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Moving from Troubled to Bold Faith]
The author of more than 40 books, Wangerin’s writing career encompassed multiple literary genres: fiction, essay, spirituality, children’s stories, and biblical exposition. He was an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), speaker for the ELCA’s nationally syndicated radio program, Lutheran Vespers, from 1994 through January 2005, and a columnist for The Lutheran magazine. Prior to joining Valparaiso’s faculty he served as an inner-city pastor in Evansville, Indiana for 16 years.
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, The Year I Dreaded Christmas]
Wangerin was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006. Based on that experience he authored the book, Letters from the Land of Cancer (Zondervan, 2010), in which he wrote:
“When … we remain unprepared for the Ultimatum certainly to seize us, then the death that interrupts our daily lives is monstrous. Fight against it with all your might. Hate it. Be filled with envy and anger for those who are still healthy. Wail, plead, beg, make deals with friends and with the Infinite. Sink into despair. Lie down in hopelessness. Die, then—even before you die. Or else, prepare. Long before that final confrontation, prepare.”
And
“Never in isolation, the body/individual exists ever and only in relationships: to elements of creation; to a people, a tribe, a family; to God. Suffering a physical sickness, then, is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships. Sickness is not an enemy. It is a rooster’s crow, calling me to the truth of myself and to the precise condition of my relationships–God, society, nature.”
In August 2002, Wangerin embarked on a 9-week bicycle tour called “Outspoken for Lutheran Vespers” through eight Midwestern states in an effort to draw attention to ELCA’s radio ministry. He broke his hip in a biking accident as he neared the halfway point and completed the trip in a motor home.
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