Articles

[1] As the director of hunger education for ELCA World Hunger and a student of the Bible, I am always looking for books and resources that blend good history and theology with contemporary application. Reta Halteman Finger’s 2007 book, Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts, in many ways succeeds in […]

[1] Two of my favorite theologians set the terms of this essay. One, Kathryn Tanner, asserts as her theological base that God gives unconditionally; God gives to all; and that God wills a community of mutual benefit.1 The other, Craig Nessan of Wartburg Seminary, writes that hunger in a world of abundance is a scandal […]

[1] Poverty entraps people by ensnaring and entangling them in intricate and inescapable webs of slavery. I use “slavery” not as a metaphor, but as an apt description of what life is like for between twelve and twenty-seven million people today.1 That there are more slaves today than at any other time in history should […]

[1] The poor are “living images of God,” wrote Martin Luther in 1522, an opinion shared by Ulrich Zwingli, who argued that God “turned all visible cults from himself to the poor.”1 Both reformers knew Johannes Oecolampadius (a co-signatory at Marburg in 1529), whose treatises on poor relief began with his 1519 translation of Gregory […]

Christ was born in poverty in the stable at Bethlehem, and He died in extreme poverty, nailed naked to the Cross.1 – Karl Barth [1] Leslie Hoppe concludes his recent, comprehensive study of the texts dealing with the poor and poverty in Scripture and the Rabbinic tradition with advice on how Christians should respond today.2 […]

o the honor of the Most High alone, and for my neighbor, to be enlightened from it…. – Inscription from Orgelbüchlein by J. S. Bach, Weimar, c. 17141 The Ethical Overtones of a Famous Inscription [1] Searching for an ethical tone in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach is difficult but not impossible. It is […]

See The Core of Lutheran CORE: American Civil Religion and White Male Backlash by Jon Pahl Ah, how to respond to a rant? Especially by an author (Pahl) who thinks his new book (Empire of Sacrifice) is so brilliant that it provides the analytical key to everything that Lutheran CORE is about. It is so […]

You have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things…. Do you despise the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to […]

[1] In Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther to Leibniz1 Paul Hinlicky seeks to retrieve a number of features from Leibniz’s (1646-1716) philosophy for today’s theology, particularly his metaphysics, his doctrine of the compatibility of divine freedom and human freedom, and his theodicy (this world as the best of all possible worlds) in […]

[1] At an Ash Wednesday Service a few years back, the Dean of an Episcopal Cathedral in the South began his sermon by apologizing for what he deemed to be a “conservative” element in his homily. I braced myself for a torrent of reactionary, Bible-thumping, “hell-fire and damnation” rhetoric with women and children covering their […]