Book Review: Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in in the Digital Age by Frank McCourt, Jr. with Michael Casey
April/May 2025: Polarization: Discerning a Path Forward (Volume 25 Issue 2)
[1] Famed entrepreneur, real estate developer, and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Frank McCourt along with acclaimed journalist Michael Casey have written a book which aims to find a way for us to untangle a distorted digital ethos from a current messy reality. Most of us have heard and lamented the internet’s contribution […]
Book Review: The Problem of 12: When a Few Financial Institutions Control Everything by John Coates
December 2024/January 2025: Vocation in Turbulent Times (Volume 24 Issue 6)
[1] No doubt economics plays a role in our polarization and social fragmentation. Harvard Law School Deputy Dean John Coates has authored a cutting edge book on economic trends that Lutheran ethicists need to address and that we all need to master in order to educate the Lutherans we serve to the new realities of […]
Book Review: Is Artificial Intelligence Racist? The Ethics of AI and the Future of Humanity by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
August/September 2024: Ethical Considerations on Artificial Intelligence (Volume 24 Issue 4)
1] Though a self-proclaimed friend of Artificial Intelligence (pp.31,119), Cambridge University Professor of Global Thought Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is concerned about racism and sexism creeping into the algorithms governing emerging AI technology (pp.3-4,48-49). This is an issue that is getting some attention among experts (notably in another new book by Calvin Lawrence, Hidden in White Sight, […]
A Different Approach to Christian Nationalism
June/July 2024: Responses to Christian Nationalism (Volume 24 Issue 3)
[1] In the glossary of the draft of the proposed ELCA Social Statement on Civic Life and Faith, Christian Nationalism is said to be: A cultural framework that idealizes and advocates fusion of certain Christian views with American civil life. This nationalistic ideology believes, among other things that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired, that […]
Book Review: We Are Electric: Inside the 300-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee
December 2023/January 2024: Addressing the Sin of Child Abuse (Volume 23 Issue 6)
[1] Science and technology writer Sally Adee has written a book that provides a summary of the research demonstrating that electric currents run throughout bodies, even in the mind, and every living thing (the field of bioelectricity). This is a valuable volume for Christian ethicists and for any Christian thinker interested in what theology can […]
Can We Really Be So Sure When Human Life Begins? What Recent Neurobiological Data Might Entail for the Abortion Debate
February/March 2023: Il/legal Abortion: Lutheran Ethical Responses post-Dobbs (Volume 23 Issue 1)
[1] Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the abortion debate has entered a new phase. And yet in another sense, nothing is new. The same old arguments get made on both sides with neither side really engaging the other. On one hand, there are those of the Pro-Choice movement, in accord with […]