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Actions Mighter Than Boastings
Dr. Dot Redius Kasik
with Ann Aalgaard
Actions Mightier Than Boastings tells the story of the Lutheran Ladies Aid in rural Iowa-Minnesota, 1930-1959. “I don’t think young women of the church today appreciate what hard work it was,” says Gwen. “But we used to have so much fun! Hard work, that’s how we made our fun.” The Aid organized their congregation’s social life, raised their monies, and carried out a ministry to the wider community. From fundraising to cooking to providing janitorial services—whatever work a congregation needed to accomplish—the Ladies Aid planned, ordered, and executed. In so doing they became repositories for the traditions of their Lutheran faith.
Every living Ladies Aid member knows two things: one, that her Ladies Aid—the Lutheran Aid predating the mega-mergers in the second half of the 20th Century—is directly responsible for today’s Lutheran church; and two, that the way to preserve the church is to make sure today’s generation knows the story.
Actions Mightier than Boastings tells the engaging story of how ordinary Norwegian-America church women kept the little rural churches of the Iowa-Minnesota border going through the Great Depression, World War II, and the new rural America of the 1950s. The church men may have thought they were in charge, but it was the labor of their wives and daughters that made a vital church life possible. It is time for the women’s stories to be told, and Kasik and Aalgaard do so with affection and insight.
—Mark U. Edwards, Jr.
President Emeritus, St. Olaf College
6" x 9" trade paperback
144 pages
ISBN 978-1-934582-15-2
$15.00
Book is available from Amazon or author
Sample Pages
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