Articles

[1] The current threat of war against Iraq is very troubling and possibly very ill-advised. Religious communities are right to be questioning this course of action for the United States. However their ability to play a helpful role will depend especially on making that case without dismissing the possible threat from Saddam Hussein and his […]

[1] At the close of the 2003 ELCA Churchwide Assembly, a video introducing the site of the 2005 Assembly in Orlando invited Lutherans to attend by using images drawn from Walt Disney World. This may have been an innocuous enough bit of marketing. In American popular culture Walt Disney is practically synonymous with “innocence,” and […]

[1] Thoreau once quipped, “what is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” Middle- and upper-income North Americans enjoy larger private dwellings and more spacious lots than their counterparts in the rest of the industrialized world. Yet, increasingly we are coming to question the health of […]

[1] The challenges for small town and rural America continue to be significant, as they have been for some time. In particular, small town and rural America faces financial stress in many sectors, especially in those communities financially dependent on the agricultural industry. The presence of financial stress has affected these communities, and these effects […]

1. Conflict [1] Throughout its history, conflict and contentiousness have characterized efforts to make public policy in the American West. Ours is a “legacy of conquest” as Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, in which Westerners with diverse interests and backgrounds engage in an “ongoing competition for legitimacy – for the right to claim for oneself and […]

[1] One of the fruits of the 1997 North American Lutheran-Reformed Formula of Agreement was its development of the concept “mutual affirmation and mutual admonition.” Given a common core of shared belief, each brings to the other a fresh charism and a corrective of reductionist tendencies. The Journal’s request for a Reformed perspective on Lutheran […]

[1] Scott R. Murray, currently a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastor in Houston, Texas, began this book as a dissertation at New Orleans Baptist Seminary. His work was motivated initially by what he perceived as an ethical libertinism in the ELCA’s human sexuality studies of the early 1990s. The goal of this book is to […]

©2002 Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. (This article originally appeared in the September issue (Vol. 30, No. 7) of the Corporate Examiner, a publication of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.) For more information, please visit www.iccr.org, or call 212-870-2295. [1] To say that 2001 and 2002 have been watershed years for corporate governance would […]

[1] This article inaugurates a column that will appear three or four times during the coming year. Its purpose is to review books addressing genetic engineering and its implications for the future of humanity. I’m using several criteria in selecting books to be discussed: 1) They will be directed to society at large, which means […]

This address was given at Trinity Lutheran Seminary’s Commencement in May of 2003. Used with permission. [1] Exhausted faculty, indebted graduates, anxious development officers and president, relieved partners, children, parents, and friends, I am delighted to be your commencement speaker. [2] Such is the manner of a concocted commencement address by Garrison Keillor, who, after […]