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The Spent Dandelion offers guests hospitality on several fronts: a four-season studio apartment overlooking 20 acres of North Shore woods; our large garden and orchard—and its harvests; private consultations with Anna, a trained pastor and theologian, to explore and deepen your faith and religious curiosity; and proximity to the glorious woods, lakes, trails, restaurants, and artisans dotting the towns along Lake Superior.

Simply request an author, a book, or a subject from Anna’s 4,000 volume library, and she’ll be happy to grab all the resources she has for you.

Our rate is $220 per night, which includes the stay as well as an hour of consultation for every night you spent with us. This conversation can take place while you are here, or later: as many guests have said, they can Zoom me, but not the Shore!

For those who are rostered leaders, this stay “counts” as continuing education, and could be applied to your CE expenses.

If this rate is challenging to you, please reach out using the contact info below.

Retreat

Our private studio apartment offers thoroughly indulgent full and queen beds, as well as a sleek couch that folds out into a futon for another guest; a three-quarter bath; a kitchenette stocked with essential cookware, bakeware, and place settings for four; free wi-fi; a desk and printer for your working needs; a quiet deck overlooking the woods; and the occasional bear sighting and howl of a coyote, wolf, or hoot of an owl.

Whether you come as a rostered leader to steward your professional Continuing Education, or reserve a few days as a lay person so that you can fuss with a question about theology or your religious beliefs, or you perceive a pull to deepen your faith and discover its relevance, or maybe you want to engage in focused reading, writing, and studying; or perhaps you simply yearn to breathe clean and quiet and woodsy air; in any and all events, the Spent Dandelion welcomes you, and hopes to send you back with clarity, calm, and courage to enter the claims and fray of life again.

Continue the Tour

Reflect

What do you get when you combine the libraries of a New Testament theologian-father, a systematic theologian-daughter, and generous donations from people near and far? A happily lost afternoon of book perusal. Covering biblical studies, systematics, ancient and modern languages, feminist and womanist theologies, liberation theologies, mujerista and minjung theologies, queer theologies, Church history, world religions, ethics, psychology, neurology, society, creation care, social justice, philosophy, politics, these 4,000 + volumes will tempt you to pull up a seat and expand your mind. Check them out in advance here (with more to be added to the count) and even find your requested selections waiting for you in the apartment when you arrive.

Restore

The Spent Dandelion promises to do all it can to attend to your hopes and plans for your time here, so that refreshed, you can return more centered and energized to the spot you call home and the people whom you love.

We are aided and abetted by the forest of the North Shore and the waters of the grandest of them all, Lake Superior.

What We Offer

Story

Anna Madsen is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and serves as a freelance theologian in Two Harbors, MN. After serving a small congregation in South Dakota, she and her late husband moved to Regensburg, Germany for five years. There she earned a PhD. in Systematic Theology, studying especially God's presence in suffering. Since then, she's experienced her own share of radical hurt and radical hope, each of which has transformed her world, her perspectives, her theology, and her openness to the messy questions.

Taken all together, they are the very roots of the Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center.

Anna lives with her husband David Willis, a man who is nothing if not generous in every way, and who surprised and surprises her each day with new love and new life.

They live with Anna’s son Karl, a resilient and joyful young man who, when a very small child, suffered a traumatic brain injury, but in spite and to spite that TBI lives a life of love and mischief.

Together, they have created Karl’s Wheelhouse (www.karlswheelhouse.org/FB Karl’s Wheelhouse), newly deemed a non-profit. Its mission is to provide meaningful rather than menial work for people with disabilities in our rural area. Combining David’s woodworking and creative skills with Karl’s outlook and extroversion, the Wheelhouse, located in Two Harbors, has opened its doors to wax, wood, paper, and other products made with the gifts of and thanks to adaptations for people with disabilities so that they can find both vocation and community.

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