The Arthur Carl Piepkorn Center for Evangelical Catholicity is a religious non-profit organization established to make the personal and professional written works of Arthur Carl Piepkorn (1907-1973+), Pastor, U.S. Army Chaplain, Professor of Lutheran Symbolics, and Confessor of the Faith available on the Internet and on digital media at little or no cost to users.
A major project of the Center is the compilation of an annotated bibliography of Piepkorn's writings. At this writing in mid 2006 the bibliography contains more than 200 items and runs to more than 50 pages. For a copy of the latest version by email attachment, contact the Director.
The Center maintains this website and publishes an occasional newsletter sent by email attachment to its continually growing email list of persons interested in the work of the Center.
The Center has copies of most of Piepkorn's 200 or so publications, many of them in journals donated to the Center by supporters of the Center.
The Center also has photocopies or electronic scans of about 3,000 pages of documents from the 148 boxes in the Piepkorn Papers in the Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Elk Grove Village, IL, and the 28 boxes in the Piepkorn Papers in the Archives of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. Almost 200 of these documents are letters, many of which a miniature theological treatises on topics that are still troublesome issues in the Church today.
The Center uses an Epson Perfection 3200 scanner and professional optical character scanning software (Omnipage Office Pro 15) to scan documents and convert them to PDFs and Word for Windows documents. Computer files are backed up on DVDs, on a stand alone hard drive, and on Yahoo.Briefcase.
The Center was founded and is directed by Philip J. Secker, the last sutdent to receive a doctorate under Piepkorn. Secker is assisted by many volunteers who help with technical information, OCR processing, translation of foreign languages, typing, proofreading, and suggestions.
Although the Director originally did not plan to do any writing, he immediately concluded that he had to get into print some of what he was finding in the Piepkorn Papers and has published a half-dozen articles and a number of letters to the editor of various journals.
In early 2005 the Executive Director of the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau asked the Director to edit volumes 2-4 of Piepkorn's writings. He has hundreds of hours in on this project. See Current News for details.
In February 2006 the Director made a five hour Power Point presentation on Piepkorn and his theology to a pastors' conference on Long Island. He travels thoughout the country several times a year to do research and for personal reasons and is available to make presentations of any length on most aspects of Piepkorn's theology. His other most recent presentations were:
12/12/2004 "A Genius in the Ranks of the Lutheran Hour: Arthur Carl Piepkorn's Relationship to Walter A. Maier." Bible Class (50+ in attendance) of First Lutheran, Grand Rapids, MN. Piepkorn's account of his years as a home missionary pastor at Grace Lutheran, Chisholm, MN, were also discussed.
3/16/04 "May Laypersons Ever Excercise the Office of Word and Sacrament?" New England District, Circuit 6. See the link and "Pastoral Conference Presentations" below.
"John 20:23 The Forgiving and Retaining of Sin." New England District, Circuit 6.
If you would like to be added to one of the Center email lists, please click on Email Lists below and follow the directions there. There is no cost and you can specify the Primary, Secondary or Tertiary Email list, thereby controlling how many emails you are likely to receive per year.
If you want the address or phone number of the Director, please remove the x's from the following email address and send him an email requesting them (the x's are there to thwart Internet crawlers that troll the Internet looking for email addresses:
xxpsecker@xxsnet.xxnet
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