Unique Collection Offers Expected as well as Unusual Religious Treasures from the North

If you’re curious to see the original (in English translation) version of the popular hymn “How Great Thou Art,” Scandinavian Pietists is the book to have. This is the latest book I’ve edited to come off the presses from Paulist Press, and it was both professionally and personally a project dear to my heart from the very beginning. Having lived in Sweden for six years I became aware of the variety of Christian movements popular there. And on a visit to Arctic Sweden in the 1990s I made the acquaintance of some nice young people who belonged to one of the pietist groups based in a larger town nearby. So when, during the AAR Annual Meeting in 2006 Dr. Mark Granquist approached me at the Paulist Press booth and wanted to interest me in his proposal on Scandinavian Pietism for our Classics of Western Spirituality series, to say that I was very interested is putting it mildly. And so there ensued some years of lively correspondence while the book took shape, including my not infrequent question, “Why is Lars Levi Laestadius under Finland? He was from Swedish Lapland!”  I eventually bowed to Dr. Granquist’s expertise that this intriguing clergyman, who was himself half-Sami and a tireless worker in the Temperance movement, was chiefly active in Finland.

(The photograph on the book’s cover is one that I took of the church in Kvikkjokk, northern Sweden, where one of the Laestadius kin served as pastor. I remember one of my earliest visits to that church as the first time I ever saw a female member of the clergy in action; she was officiating at a wedding.)

The book is divided into the four Scandinavian countries – Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Some of the authors represented will be familiar especially to people who know their hymns – Lina Sandell-Berg, Carl Olof Rosenius, and N.F.S. Grundtvig among them, in addition to Carl Boberg. Scandinavian Pietism has been one of those religious movements renowned for “doing” theology through hymns, and so the hymns are well represented in their own section.

The contents are a wide-ranging collection from published theological treatises to personal letters. Some of the authors wanted to remain within the established Lutheran state church of their country; others made a break. Scandinavian Pietism presents an unparalleled overview of a movement (if one can refer to such a variety of devotionalisms and theologies as “a movement”)    that has left its indelible mark – and continues to do so – on the four Nordic countries.