heatherdean

[1] On January 6, 2022, the Lutheran Ethicists gathered by Zoom before the virtual annual meeting of the Society for Christian Ethics.  The topic was about the nature and possibility of justice in America after nearly 250 years of slavery and not quite 160 years of post-slavery systemic racism.  This issue of JLE presents the […]

[1] In 1989, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon published Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, arguing that the end of Christendom in the West arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, the night the Fox Theatre opened on a Sunday evening. “The Fox Theatre went head to head with the church over who would provide the […]

[1] Don’t Look Up, a much-discussed movie that came out on Netflix in December 2021, posits a comet heading towards the Earth that will wipe out life on the planet. The comet is intended to represent the coming catastrophe of climate change, and the movie satirizes the denialism, greed, and disinterest paralyzing the discussion and […]

[1] Our reviews this month cover the latest books by progressive scholar Catherine Keller and Rod Dreher, writer for The American Conservative. Both authors speak of present and looming dangers, and they offer perspectives for moving forward. In Facing Apocalypse (2021), Keller addresses the climate catastrophe and democracy. Returning to the Book of Revelation, a site of her […]

[1] As a pastor in the LCA ordained in 1981 now serving in the ELCA, I experienced the embodied pastoral ethics of Vison and Expectations as being too weighted in scope and emphasis on sexual ethics so that all other ethical considerations were overwhelmed.  Today, with the demise of Vision and Expectations, there remains a […]

[1] Social media platforms have fast become essential, embedded institutions. By the term “social media” I’m referring to web-based platforms that host individuals and communities, these include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, WeChat, WhatsApp, MeWe, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Meetup, Medium, Quora, and Twitch. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2005, 5% of […]

[1] When I was growing up, I remember hearing the theme song to the popular American television show Cheers proclaim: “Making your way in the world today takes everything you got.” For many people across the world, in wildly different contexts, that sentence rings profoundly, and sadly, true. Humans endure unsustainably long workdays at a […]

[1] In June of 2019, I wrote a letter to the bishop of my synod[1] after I was called into his office to let me know that I had been flagged by the larger denominational structure for “indebtedness.” I was extremely embarrassed by the situation: there I was, explaining why I was in debt, and […]

[1] Each issue, the editorial staff at JLE create questions to spark conversation for adult education and to inspire thoughtful contemplation and reflection for individual readers.  Because of the topic of this edition, many of these questions might be especially fruitful for conversation in the congregational setting as members consider constructive approaches to challenges in […]

[1] In this season of Epiphany, North Americans experience the continued darkness of winter but can see the faint glimmer of light on the Eastern sky a little earlier each morning.  This winter, we are all trying to mitigate the forces that keep us separated from each other: the highly transmissible Omicron variant of Covid-19 […]