Bad

Bad is the German for bath. Stuttgart is a stud farm, Württemberg is a hill — and the town this whole series is named after is a spa, whose sulfur springs were found in 1595 and whose Wunderbad a pastor named Blumhardt bought in 1852 so that people could come and stay and be prayed for.

This episode is the story of the house: the wonder-bath and its two generations of Blumhardts; the olive grove outside Athens that gave the Evangelical Academy its name; Bishop Wurm's journey through the ruins in June 1945, three brothers named Müller in the car, and the academy Wurm and Eberhard Müller founded at Bad Boll on Michaelmas that year — the first in Germany. And the reason the Missouri Synod's seven men ended up arguing the Augsburg Confession in a health resort: it was the only house in Germany that belonged to nobody in the argument.

Also: what the archive at Bad Boll has just sent across the ocean — the Kurhaus's own letter of January 1948 (85 beds, 65 cots, bring your own linen), and the Academy's library copy of Missouri's little 1949 booklet, filed in pencil under one word: Gasttagung. A guest conference.

Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.