Introducing Will

Hello! Will Layton here. I’m a first-year M.Div. student here at Wartburg Seminary, and almost something like a local here in Dubuque- my grandparents grew up just south of the city in two small farming towns, Andrew and La Motte, and I still have an aunt and some other relatives in Dubuque. I grew up in Clinton, Iowa, and studied history and English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where I fell in love with Nordic culture and spent three summers as an intern at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum. After graduating from Luther, I, like Megan, spent a year with the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, though I was in Washington D.C., where I was an Eco-Justice Fellow with the National Council of Churches. In D.C., I also became an associate member of Augustana Lutheran Church, a socially progressive, multi-ethnic, liturgically high-church congregation, originally of Swedish background.

     Academically, I’m especially interested in the history of Lutheran doctrine, the history of Lutheranism in North America, liturgics, and Anglican-Lutheran relations. My interest in liturgics, particularly, has led me to become a kind of “worship tourist” whenever I visit new places, and one of the things I’m most looking forward to about visiting Iceland is the chance to experience worship in a unique context. I also collect hymnals and worship books, and you can bet I won’t leave Iceland until I can get myself a Sálmabók. In my spare time, I repair old bicycles, spend time outdoors hiking, fishing, skiing, and canoeing, and play the banjo.  

     This trip will be my fourth to Europe. As a student at Luther College I was able to spend a semester in Münster, Germany, and more briefly visit the Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Spain, and Austria. Iceland has been at the top of my travel wish-list ever since I read The Sagas of Icelanders as a teenager and around the same time started listening to bands like Sigur Rós. I’ve dreamt about visiting Iceland for so long, I can’t wait to see if the real Iceland is anything like the one in my imagination, which looks something like this: 

     That’s probably enough for now. Since we’re flying on Monday, I’ll close with my slight adaptation of a prayer, “For Those Who Travel by Air,” written by the pastor and liturgiologist Paul Zeller Strodach for the United Lutheran Church in America’s 1935 Collects and Prayers:

Eternal God, whose almighty power has created, and who orders, this world in which we live; whose all-guarding love surrounds your children in all their goings and comings: Into your keeping we commit all those who travel by air, and all those whose daily tasks bring them into the perils of the places above the earth, that you, without whose knowledge not even a sparrow falls, may preserve them from all harm and accident to body and life; and as we fly through the realms above the earth, uplift our hearts to you in trust and praise; through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. Amen.