Articles

[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. […]

[1] Reactions to the use of personal stories in the pulpit are easy to come by. Many of these reactions, it must be admitted, are strongly negative. They vary from mild hesitation to outright rejection. Such reactions, informed or otherwise, must be taken seriously. Even those that seem overstated signal a potential danger. Traps await […]

[1] I heard Pastor Friedrich preach hundreds of sermons. He was the only pastor of the congregation in which I grew up. Our family was in church every Sunday. I remember only one of those hundreds of sermons and actually only a part of that one. He preached on the text, “Judge not lest ye […]

Langerak, Edward, Civil Disagreement: Personal Integrity in Pluralistic Society. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014, 170 pages, paperback, $29.95.

[1] You don’t have to be an aficionado of YouTube to have witnessed the most profound public abuse of the Christian pulpit in recent memory. [2] At the end of May, Father Michael Pfleger ascended the pulpit steps at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama’s former congregation. Pfleger is a maverick, politically […]

[1] As a draft teaching document for the ELCA, the document provides scant and occasional reference to classical and past Lutheran theological construals of human sexuality, especially in relation to ‘homosexuality’. The only explicit reference in the body of the text is the statement that “[a]t this particular point in history, this church confesses with […]

[1] In many ways, the Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (DSSHS) represents a better theological foundation for a Lutheran approach to sexual ethics than its predecessors, both contemporary and historical. In this essay I discuss some of the theo-ethical benefits of this draft for the ELCA. Yet this draft also has some problems, two […]

[1] “What benefits and drawbacks do you see to the theological moves made in the draft?” I was asked to respond to this question in this brief article, and I do so with enthusiasm for the powerful-if still imperfect-theological framing found in the recent ELCA draft social statement on human sexuality. Some Methodological Reflections: Four […]

[1] As a colleague put it, “It’s not the train wreck that we feared.” Indeed, there is much that is theologically laudable in the draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: centrally, the long over-due attempt in the ELCA to “frame” (#27-28) deliberation of difficult moral issues in terms of normative Lutheran theology. The ELCA has […]

Introduction According to most estimates, violence in the Darfur region of Sudan has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people since 2003, with many more forced to flee their homes. Charges of genocide have been leveled by many in the international community, including President Bush and Congress. The goal of this study […]