Author: Diane (D.M.) Yeager

After retiring from teaching ethics and philosophical theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Diane Yeager is now delighting in a totally new phase of learning as a docent at the Smithsonian’s  National Museum of Asian Art.

Book Review: The Magi: Who They Were, How They’ve Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate by Eric Vanden Eykel

[1] The Magi is a hybrid book by teacher/scholar Eric Vanden Eykel that seems designed to engage scholarly literature sufficiently to establish his reliability as a biblical scholar while also offering an analysis that will be both accessible to and engaging for college students and laypeople.  His project is essentially one of “high popularization”—a commitment to […]

Book Review: Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II by Anne M. Blankenship

[1] Our personal security is more of a fantasy than we can comfortably admit, and appeals to national security can conceal the darkest chambers of social bigotry. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eighty years ago on February 19, 1942, devastated the lives of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent (Nikkei) […]

Review: Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry

[1] Sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead (Clemson University) and Samuel L. Perry (University of Oklahoma) compel us to reflect on the twin questions that motivate Taking American Back for God: “What is Christianity’s relation to American identity and civic life? What should it be?” (3). Although they clearly state that social science cannot answer these questions, […]

Review: Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal, by Mark C. Mattes

[1] The “reappraisal” promised in the subtitle of this book is most obviously a reappraisal of Luther’s views concerning beauty.  Mark Mattes intends to establish that Luther is neither a “great foe of beauty” (1) nor the architect of the “disenchantment” of material reality (13).  The author’s larger objective, however, is to deploy Luther’s theology […]

Christian Ethics and the Church: Ecclesial Foundations for Moral Thought and Practice (Baker Academic, 2015)

[1] The Rev. Dr. Philip Turner is a retired but clearly still active veteran of the conflicts within the Episcopal Church U.S.A. Though he does not write about those rifts with any specificity in this rich and constructive book, that discord echoes through the pages of Christian Ethics and the Church. It seems reasonable to […]

Trust: A Selected Bibliography

Baier, Annette. “Demoralization, Trust, and the Virtues.” In Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers, edited by Cheshire Calhoun. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Sustaining Trust.” In Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1994. ———. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics 96, 2 (January 1986 ): 231–60. ———. “Trust and […]

The Moral Weight of Trust

[1] Near the beginning of her 1992 article “Trusting People,” Annette Baier notes that trust “cannot be given except by those who have only limited knowledge, and usually even less control, over those to whom it is given.” Therefore, she reasons, “an omniscient and otherwise omnipotent God will of necessity lack one ability that his […]

The Institutional Dilemma of Principled Dissent

[1] In July 2010, The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod Convention passed a resolution calling for a “thorough response” to the ELCA social statement Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust. In the justifying clauses of Resolution 3-05, the document asserts that the social statement “suggests a concept, namely the ‘bound conscience,’ as a ‘distinctly Lutheran’ principle of theology.” […]

God, Church, and Country: Berggrav’s Leadership in the Norwegian Resistance

[1] In December 1944 the Norwegian Lutheran bishop Eivind Josef Berggrav (1884-1959) was featured on the cover of Time, becoming one of the few protestant religious figures to have been thus honored.1 In 1942, the New York Times chose him as one of the six religious leaders to be profiled in a series headlined “Churchmen […]