Articles

[1] Christians need some criteria, some body of thought on war, in order to make sense of and to judge their own country’s policies. Two positions on war — the war realist position and the classic pacifist position — have serious deficiencies. The war realist position makes war an intrinsic part of a nation’s culture. […]

[1] Why this book? As professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, Gary Simpson is not your typical “ivy halls” academic. With a rich background in parish and chaplaincy work – none of it transpiring in traditional Lutheran territory, (California and Oregon were his mission field) – he has brought to […]

[1] Generally speaking, we humans are what I call “narrow-minded knowers.” In our striving to put together a perspective about the world and other people, or of the world in which we live with other people, we create ideas about this world and relationships with which we can feel rather comfortable. We build knowledge about […]

November 2008 [1] Postville, Iowa, a rural town of about 2,200 located in the rolling hills of northeast Iowa, would appear to be an unlikely epicenter for a debate over immigration control and our treatment of undocumented immigrants. However, when on May 12, 2008 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE—formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization […]

[1] About twenty years ago, Joseph Carens, in a seminal article on the ethics of immigration, pointedly drew attention to the essential dilemma that it poses: “Borders have guards and the guards have guns,” he wrote. To the needy, desperate, and oppressed of the world, seeking access to a free and wealthy nation like the […]

[1]The early years of the Reformation were marked by sharp disagreement between Protestant proponents of the Lutheran notion of justification and Catholic reactionaries who, in their response to the threat of the reformers, accused their opponents of antinomianism and retreated to a casuistic notion of natural law that had dominated theology since the rise of […]

[1] My assignment is to evaluate how Scripture is used in the “Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality” published in March of 2008. I will for the most part limit my focus to that single topic. All references to the document are by line number. Use of the Bible [2] By design, I start with […]

[1] The topic of self-disclosure in the pulpit is certainly worth critical exploration for the sake of honest ministry and ethical preaching. The sober reality, however, is that self-disclosure is a given in the act of preaching and cannot be helped. It just is. To say that there can be preaching without self-disclosure might be […]

[1] This article arises from the conviction that preaching from the Bible is “standing between two worlds,” a communication between the ancient biblical text and modern listeners.1 Preachers are bridges for the truth of the Word. The bridge building metaphor leads to the fact that reaching involves self-disclosure. The speaker and the message are inseparable. As Arnold states, […]