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The Spent Dandelion offers guests hospitality on several fronts: a four-season studio apartment overlooking our 20 acres of North Shore woods; our large garden and orchard—and the harvests thereof!; a 4,000+ theological library for your perusal and use; private consultations with a trained 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.

Retreat

Completely renovated, our private studio apartment offers a full and queen bed; a shower and bathroom; a kitchenette; free wi-fi; a desk and printer; a deck overlooking the woods; and the occasional howl of coyotes and wolves.

Whether you come to steward your professional Continuing Education; attend to a question about theology or your religious beliefs; honor your desire to deepen your faith and discover its relevance; or simply to read, write, study, and breathe clean and quiet and woodsy air, 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 and a systematic theologian-daughter? 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 being added to the count weekly) and even find your selections waiting for you in the apartment when you arrive.

Restore

Regardless of this place's pull to you, 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.

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 Ph.D. 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.

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