Thanks: Giving and Receiving Gratitude for America's Troops

Publisher Marketing: This is a book about faith and moral issues facing American troops and veterans. As someone who spent four years wearing a U. S. army uniform, Edgar S. Welty has plenty of ""soldier stories."" But he does not start this book with those stories. Instead, Welty introduces his work with the telling of Simon's service when he carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. He argues that ""service"" is the same as Jesus's call to ""go an 'extra' or 'second' mile."" Americans are called by Jesus to walk a ""second mile"" for American troops and veterans. This act of service is necessary because many troops are in trouble, as is demonstrated by suicide rates. Each section of this book focuses on a new issue surrounding troops and veterans. ""A thoughtful collection of stories and personal reflections on the moral complexities of being a soldier . . . written by a veteran to veterans!"" --Scott Sullender, Professor of Pastoral Counseling, San Francisco Theological Seminary Edgar S. Welty Jr. is a disabled veteran. He served in the U. S. army for four years, from April 20, 1976 to April 21, 1980. When he enlisted, he already had an AA (Arts and Letters, Grossmont Community College) and a BA (Russian Area Studies, San Diego State University). Because of his education, Edgar started as a Private First Class and was promoted automatically to Specialist Four. He was then posted to West Germany. Edgar also served as a minister of the Word and Sacrament in the United Church of Christ. After earning a Master of Divinity Degree at San Francisco Theological Seminary, he was called to serve a suburban church in upstate New York. He has acted as a Lutheran pastor in rural New York and Tiburon, California. Reverend Welty is also a Chaplain with the rank of Captain in the United States Volunteers/America and a member of the DAV, the Scottish-American Military Society, and Vets to Vets. He has two books forthcoming: God and America's Wars and a workbook titled Spiritual Insight Training for Veterans. He is also working on a DVD about Christian symbolism. Uwe Siemon-Netto, born 1936 in Leipzig, Germany, is the founder and director emeritus of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life/League of Faithful Masks in Capistrano Beach, CA. Siemon-Netto has been an international journalist for fifty-eight years. He earned his PhD from Boston University and is the author of eight books, including The Fabricated Luther: Refuting Nazi Connections and Other Modern Myths (1993, 2007), The Acquittal of God: A Theology for Vietnam Veterans (1990), and Triumph of the Absurd: A Reporter's Love for the Abandoned People of Vietnam (2015). Contributor Bio:  Siemon-Netto, Uwe Uwe is a lay theologian and internationally-renowned journalist. Siemon-Netto was born in Leipzig, Germany, where his devoutly Lutheran grandmother was the pivotal figure in his childhood in World War II. He began his journalism career 1956 as a trainee at Westfalenpost. In 1958, he joined the Associated Press in Frankfurt first as copy editor, then as slot editor and roving reporter, covering, among other things, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. From 1962 to 1969, he worked as a correspondent for Springer Foreign News Service in London, Paris, New York, Vietnam, the Middle East and Hong Kong. His assignments included the United Nations, the U. S. civil rights movement, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War (over a period of five years), the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, and China's Cultural Revolution. From 1969 to 1973 He was North American correspondent for the magazine, Der Stern. From 1973 to 1986, He served as Managing Editor for Hamburger Morgenpost, taught journalism at Hamburg's Journalistenschule Henri Nannen, worked as a freelance correspondent for German, Swiss, French and U. S. publications, and as a media consultant in Germany and the United States. In mid-career, at age 50, he began his theological studies, first in Chicago, then in Boston. During these studies, he freelanced as a magazine correspondent. At the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany's subsequent reunification, he served, concurrently with his academic work, as an editorial consultant and as executive editor for Bild, launching its East German editions, helping plan newspapers for Leipzig and Dresden, training Eastern German journalists and developing a new curriculum for Journalistenschule Axel Springer. From 1993 to 1994 he managed the redesign of Der Tagesspiegel, the Scientific American, in New York, and idea-Spektrum, a Protestant magazine in Wetzlar, Germany. He also co-founded CA-Confessio Augustana, a Lutheran quarterly magazine in Neuendettelsau, Bavaria. From 2000-2005, he was religious affairs editor of United Press International and a Washington-based columnist for a variety of German-language publications. His Ph. D. in theology and sociology of religion is from Boston University under Peter L. Berger, Carter Lindberg and Uri Ra'Anan. He spent a post-doctoral year at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, N. J. working on a project to bridge the gap between theology and the media.