Norman B. Bendroth

Norman B. Bendroth is interim minister for the First Congregational Church of Reading (UCC) in Massachusetts.

Articles by Norman B. Bendroth

Features

The cruelest month

December losses

Dec 30, 2008 by Norman B. Bendroth

On a nasty night, Christmas Eve 1965, members of my family walked into my father’s hospital room. We had just returned from my grandparents’ home, where we had celebrated a Swedish smorgasbord, caroled and opened presents. The sideboard boasted turkey, meatballs, limpa bread, inlagd sill, lutfisk, spritz cookies and svensk plum pudding.

Features

Brainstorm

Finding hope with William Styron
May 01, 2007 by Norman B. Bendroth
In 1992 I had a clinical depression. It was a long time in coming, but in hindsight it was inevitable. I was hunkered down in my study trying to write a sermon on the atonement. Behind the stormy sky in my mind, I saw not a smiling Providence offering a gesture of boundless love in sharing his son Jesus, but a scowling ogre, an angry, petulant father. Whether this torment was a function of the descending depression or a contribution to it, I cannot say, but I called my wife and said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m coming unglued.”
Cover Story

Designing the city

Reflections on the New Urbanism

Jun 20, 2001 by Norman B. Bendroth

In the spring of 1976, I took my New Hampshire youth group to Philadelphia for the bicentennial celebrations. Not wanting to break the bank on hotels, we slept in a church hall in a suburb north of the city. There, for the first time in my life, I encountered row after row, block after block, street after street of identical beige cinderblock houses.

Books

Inland Architecture, by Phillip Bess

Oct 18, 2000 reviewed by Norman B. Bendroth

Philip Bess likes cities, especially Chicago. He likes cities that work--cities that do not just promote commercial and cultural activity and move traffic, garbage and pedestrians efficiently, but that create a space for human flourishing. Cities are not utilitarian entities governed by impersonal market forces. They are moral entities, Bess argues.