Rosemary Radford Ruether

On Sharing the Sacred Sauna

Rosemary Radford Ruether

No. 30 · Fall 2009

Reprinted from the National Catholic Reporter (August 1968), Ruether’s reflection from her time as a theologian on the faculty of Holden Village describes Lutheran community life in the mountains of northern Washington from a Catholic perspective — finding more catholicity in this Lutheran retreat than in many Roman Catholic communities — and culminates in a celebration of the Holden sauna as “the new sacrament, the new fellowship, the new theology.”