We’re excited to announce the first day of Sunday School is September 12! Please join us in the Fellowship Hall as Pastor Dan and Kirsten start us off with music for all students. Classes will immediately follow in the Sunday School Building for preschool through grades 6. After second service, we’ll begin our festival featuring BBQ hot dogs, condiments and drinks. Please plan to bring a salad or side dish to share for lunch. We’ve planned games for all ages, and a bounce house, face painting and balloons for kids. Dilly Dally the clown will also join us! LCI does a great job of welcoming the community so let’s spread the word and invite our friends and neighbors for fun, fun, fun!!!
The renowned theologian and author, Rev. Dr. H. Paul Santmire 
will be making his way through northern California beginning the end of September for three notable events. He will give the Founder’s Day lecture at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley on Wednesday, September 29 on the topic, “The Ecological Promise of Christian Theology: Reclaiming a Contested Theme” (you may register at http://plts.edu/founders_day.html). He will then come to Lutheran Church of the Incarnation on Sunday, October 3 to lead our adult forum and preach a sermon entitled, “The Earth is Your Neighbor.” Following this, he will then speak that night at St. John's Lutheran Church in Sacramento.
A Lutheran pastor with experience in academic, inner-city, and metropolitan settings, Dr. Santmire has also pursued a scholarly vocation in the discipline of ecological theology and environmental ethics for more than forty years.
Much preoccupied with social justice issues throughout his career, Dr. Santmire responded to the church struggle against apartheid in his book South African Testament: From Personal Encounter to Theological Challenge (1987) at the height of the crisis in that country, when there was little hope for peaceful transformation. During his 13-year inner-city pastorate in Hartford, CT, he was a founder and “the godfather” of a grass-roots community organization that mobilized low-income and minority constituencies. He also regularly addressed social justice issues as an Op-Ed columnist for the Hartford Courant.
Dr. Santmire outlined his own theology of nature in his book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology (2000), in which he presents a “revisionist” testament of ecological theology, ranging through topics such as creation and cosmology, Christology and mission, spirituality and liturgy, ecological ethos and environmental ethics, and drawing on witnesses as diverse as Augustine and the classical Celtic saints, St. Francis and Luther, Martin Buber and John Muir.
Dr. Santmire’s most recent book is Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis (2008), in which he explores Christian ritual as the matrix for the Christian community’s renewed life with nature and with the poor of the earth. His Theological Autobiography appeared in Dialog 48:3 (Fall 2009), pp. 267–278.
Dr. Santmire graduated from Harvard College (1957) and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (1960), before completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School (1966), with a dissertation with systematic theologian Gordon Kaufman focusing on Karl Barth’s theology of nature. He brought these learnings to bear in the wider church as a theological writer for the statements on the environment of the Lutheran Church in America (1972) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1983).
