Articles

This issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics focuses on violence from several different perspectives. While one article explores the cause of violence as a religious phenomenon, another looks specifically at the Christian tradition. A third article centers on Martin Luther’s theological understanding of violence.

Instead of focusing his project narrowly on the hot-button sacredness-of-life topics, Gushee comes at the topic more broadly: “If any human life is sacred, every human life is sacred” (3). The sacredness of human life, in this construal, is not simply a religious conviction held only by Christians or certain kinds of philosophers but an ancient conviction of most cultures, period.

Pahl illuminates the motif of “sacrifice” or “blessed brutalities” as one permeating all layers of the social and cultural fabrics in ways that purport to offer an explanatory framework for the analysis of contemporary imperial American practices. He reads patterns of “sacrifice” or “performative violence” into practices as diverse as domestic abuse, slavery, and cinematic representations of youth in order to gesture to their inter-linking with one another and to expose the misguided religiosity of such practices.

Social statements of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America provide guidance to the church and its members on a variety of issues. Given the historical legacy of racism in the United States, this social statement focuses on and explores the question, “How, then, shall we live?”

Benjamin Taylor offers a theological and ethical reflection on the “Stand Your Ground” law, examining its legal ramifications and its relation to Christian ethics. Taylor observes, “…although our country may stand divided for the moment, we do believe in the power of the reconciling love of the cross, the power which defeats death and gathers the people of God together once more.”

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, Cheryl Pero uses the framework of Luther’s catechism to ask: “will we use this opportunity to expose, explore, and exorcize our racial problems or continue to pretend that we live in a “post-racial” society, in a state of denial?”

The tragic death of Trayvon Martin has raised many issues for Americans in particular. The authors of the two articles in this edition of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics explore a couple of these issues in light of the Christian faith.

In this short and readable text, authors Helen Cameron, John Reader, and Victoria Slater summarize the results of an action learning event held at Ripon College in Cuddesdon, United Kingdom, in April of 2010. Participants reflected on moments of decision, when a person’s faith was compromised; moments of cross-cultural confrontation, when a person’s identity was in question; or moments of crisis, when a particularly difficult decision created conflict.

The book presents what Stassen calls “Incarnational Discipleship”; part one gives the basic foundations, and part two shows how Incarnational Discipleship meets seven challenges of secularity. Throughout, Stassen is making the argument that Incarnational Discipleship meets four specific criteria for a valid theological ethic.

Christine Gudorf’s approach in Comparative Religious Ethics: Everyday Decisions for our Everyday Lives is to focus on the practical and the experiential in an attempt to “lift up values, meanings, and interpretations from religions and also from ‘secular’ thought (most of which has been influenced by the dominant religion of the culture) that are relevant to the most basic interests and activities of contemporary human beings in North America.”