In the New Year, A Protestant Devotion to Mary?

Link to the cover story of the December Christian Century.

It is an overview article, meant for introduction to the subject of "a Protestant Mariology" and at some points clearly written to ask questions and provoke discussion rather than to state unequivocally what ought to be done.

But it makes some good points, such as the following:

We might begin considering the place of Mary in devotion by noting some ways not to renew a discussion about her. We ought not speak as though all that matters about her is the virgin birth. This question, central in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century, treats Mary herself as a side issue, a mere conduit for the one she bore. A second way not to proceed is to use Mary to say anew that which Protestants already say. For example, when Luther treated Mary he tended to depict her as a model for justification by grace alone—that is, as further evidence for what he already believed. If we are to attend to Mary anew, the effort should yield something fresh, something neglected in our own churches and lives.

Also worth noting is that Robert Jenson, in his Systematic Theology, comes out in favor of asking the saints for their intercession:

Jenson argues that death does not sever the bonds of the body of Christ—as even most Protestant eucharistic prayers makes clear. To ask for a departed saint’s prayer, then, is not in principle different from asking another Christian for her prayers. We hold that the saints are not simply gone but are ever alive to God, and so we ought also consider them to be available as intercessors, and powerful ones at that.

It would have been interesting to learn from this article what the official Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue came up with on the subject of Mary and the saints, not to mention the dialogues between Roman Catholics and other churches.

There is a two-page sidebar elsewhere on the site detailing an Hispanic Methodist pastor's negative response.