Articles

[Originally included in JLE July/August 2014] [1] Daniel Finn is the William and Virginia Clemens Professor of Economics and the Liberal Arts and professor of theology at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict in Collegeville, Minnesota. He has published extensively in the area of Christian ethics and economics and enjoys the genuine […]

[Originally published in JLE September 2015] [1] Ted Peters opens up the doctrine of justification by grace for Christ’s sake through faith so that we can see and appreciate how truly radical it is as he unpacks its vitality for our lives and our life in engaging this complex world. The doctrine of justification though […]

[Originally published in JLE June 2016] [1] Adrian Thatcher is honorary professor in the department of theology and religion at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is highly regarded for his work in theology and human sexuality. He has edited the 2015 Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality and Gender. His most recent book […]

“What if long-term PTSD is less about what happened out there (in combat), and more about the society they come back to?” [1] This past November, I heard author and journalist Sebastian Junger speak at a Navy SEAL Foundation conference on mental health issues in persons serving in the Naval Special Warfare (NSW) community. Junger, […]

[1] Utilitarianism, the pragmatic philosophy developed by Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) and John Stuart Mill (d. 1873) views actions as good or moral that conduce to human happiness and as bad or immoral those that do not. Its critics sometimes argue that justice is more important than individual freedom to pursue one’s bliss. Peter Singer […]

The two articles in this issue of JLE are very different from each other. The first article comes from the pen of Ted Peters, distinguished Research Professor of Systematic Theology (and Religion and Science) at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. Different from his past contributions to the Journal in this article, he engages the question of economism. He follows closely the work of his colleague, Richard Norgaard, who has articulated an alternative economic proposal that puts ecological concerns over market economic interest. With the help of Langdon Gilkey’s hermeneutics Peters reads economism as the structuring myth of contemporary society and calls for (and models) a thorough criticism of its crypto-theological underpinning.

Economism is a myth that requires demythologizing. Economist and ecologist Richard Norgaard insightfully describes economism as a secular religion at whose altar American society and many other societies worship. Economism is the free-market ideology that has so imprisoned the American mind that it can no longer address the urgent matter of climate change. Economism is an idolatrous religion that is leading the planet to destruction. This article augments Norgaard’s treatment of economism by calling it a myth and then offering a prophetic critique in the form of demythologizing, or better, demythicizing. Only by demythologizing the myth of economism can the church speak to the larger society’s responsibility to care for the poor and the planet in light of a vision of the common good.

Taken from a lecture delivered to a meeting of Lutheran and Wesleyan ethicists, Burroughs’ article explores how and why Lutheran and Methodist understandings of moral transformation differ. Burroughs skillfully analyzes Luther and Wesley’s writings, along with theologians of their traditions who have been influenced from both. With this laid out, he then addresses the question, “What do these differences mean for us today?

Tranvik believes one of the problems identified by Luther 500 years ago—that Christians too often regard Gospel faith and life in the world as separate realms of human endeavor, neither interacting with, nor informing one another—is still with us. He believes that the separation of faith from everyday life is harmful both to faith and to the world in which Christians live, and that Luther’s theology of vocation provides a vital alternative. Finally, Tranvik believes that telling the story of how Luther lived out his solution to this problem will be helpful to readers in the twenty-first century.

Though it was published three years ago (2014), the information, issues, and tenor of Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions contains a present day salience perhaps not foreseen by the editors and contributors at the time. We appear to be entering another time of intense debate over the nature and need of things global – globalization, globalism, global institutions, global narratives – versus a resurfacing of neo-nationalism through Brexits, the call to make America great (or first) again, and the public and foreign policies of states as diverse as Russia, China, Hungary, or the Philippines. Perhaps not another “paradigm shift” as occurred in November 1989, but questions have returned to the public discourse loudly and clearly about the vitality of NATO, or the relevance of regional organizations such as the European Union, or if the positive purpose of regional or hemispheric trade treaties like NAFTA is outweighed by their future impacts, risks, or constraints.