A couple of hours after my wife’s 98-year-old grandmother had a stroke earlier this month, the family gathered by her bedside in the house she’d lived in for a quarter of a century. Said grandmother,
Blanche Jenson
, was also my beloved godmother—someone whose comfort, home-cooked dinners, and instruction in theology had gotten me through a few exceptionally rough years. It was with her that
I re-read
Augustine’s
Confessions
, discussed in some detail each issue of
First Things
when it arrived, and did my best to make sense of the daunting output of
her late husband
, the Lutheran priest and ecumenical theologian
Robert W. Jenson
, especially his two-volume
Systematic Theology
.