Articles

[1] I would love to start my review by talking about the importance of Passionate for Justice at “a time like this,” but that qualification immediately rings hollow for me. [2] Threat of danger is the traumatic, collective history and memory (and, too often, direct experience) that Black [1] and Brown people just know. To wit, Passionate for Justice co-author […]

[1] Holy Mischief is a timely book that witnesses to the painful and difficult reality of women’s oppression and discrimination in the church.  Her book talks specifically about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but the situation there is not unique. Many people seem to think that because women have been ordained in this Church for 50 […]

[1] Last October when the JLE Advisory Council met to plan the issues for 2020 we decided to put the summer book review issue in June.  We, or at least I, envisioned professors on summer break from classes having time to peruse new books on the beach while pastors and lay leaders had a more relaxed […]

[1] We begin with a book that, though 30 years old, speaks to our current situation as if it was written yesterday.  Reviewing Parker Palmer’s, The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America’s Public Life, Stewart Herman discovers wisdom for navigating the social isolation of our pandemic era.  More broadly, he finds fruitful insights […]

[1] Parker Palmer is familiar to educators as a beacon of hope and courage.  His 1998 Courage to Teach articulated the dignity and even nobility of the profession to young instructors like me.  His 2000 Let Your Life Speak fearlessly recounted his own struggles to sustain a sense of meaning in his life.  Yet his 1981 The Company of Strangers might be […]

[1] Anna Madsen’s new book, I Can Do No Other: The Church’s New Here We Stand Moment, is not explicitly about the relationship between church and state.  It is, rather about discipleship, about taking the promise of the Gospel that though “death is real, life is realer” and the message of the Reformation that justification means that injustice threatens […]

[1] Daniel Castillo frames his volume by asking how, in our current global context, we are to relate salvation, liberation, and care for creation. His answer, this book’s thesis, comes in the work’s title: Christians are to respond to our planetary emergencies with An Ecological Theology of Liberation, that is, with “a mode of discourse that […]

[1] Editor Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen introduces this excellent collection of articles by explaining that the aim of the volume “is to widen the scope of Luther’s and Lutheran theology by discussing Luther and Lutheran theology as perceived from the perspective of the subaltern, those who are never or rarely heard.  The hope is to […]

 [1] Kaleidoscope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction is a collection of essays written by and for people of color in the practice of spiritual direction.  Its wisdom, however, is helpful to all people in the art of holy listening.  Providing a comprehensive resource covering the various components of spiritual direction, the book’s four […]

[ 1] At the university where I teach, opportunities exist for students to receive funding to collaborate with faculty on summer research projects. This summer, one student working with me is investigating social forms beyond religion that provide non-religiously affiliated people (the “nones”) with meaningful community-based social ties and opportunities for civic engagement. To set […]