heatherdean

[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 […]

[1] As a white male middle-aged pastor with a beautiful family and photogenic dog, I couldn’t possibly be more of the image of white privilege in the church.  Which is why it was important for me to read White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. [2] The book White Too Long […]

Rev. Dr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is Associate Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church in Japan. She has lived, served, and taught in multiple contexts throughout her ministry and brings her curiosity, humor, intelligence, and confessional insights to us through those lenses.   This book is a compendium of results from a case study method that Wilson […]

For Congregational Dialogue: [1] In this retrospective issue, we are republishing two activities for adult education on these topics.  The first is a group activity from the October 2019 issue on deliberative dialogue. The second is a personal meditative activity from the February 2020 issue on Faith, Reason, and Climate Change.   [2] A Deliberative […]

[1] As the secular year draws to a close and the new church year opens into the season of Advent it seems a fitting moment to take a pause and to reflect on the turbulent last two years. This issue of JLE, therefore, is not introducing a new topic but is instead drawing together some […]

Please consider submitting a paper proposal for the Journal of Lutheran Ethics.  For our submission guidelines, click here.  June, 2022 Summer Book Review Issue Please submit the title and a short description of a book you would like to review.  Please send proposals for reviews to Jennifer.Hockenbery@elca.org.  August, 2022  “Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sexuality” Please consider […]

[1] The book, Picture the Bible, by Stacy Johnson Meyers is an appropriately named children’s Bible. Beginning with creation “In the beginning,” to the Bible’s last word, “Amen,” Picture the Bible affirms God’s baptismal promise “You belong to God,” in 53 sequential stories written for young children, ages four to seven. [2] Beautiful and colorful […]

[1] Evener’s revised University of Chicago dissertation explores relationships between selfhood, suffering, and the knowledge of truth in the early Reformation writings of Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt, and Thomas Muntzer.  Through meticulous textual work, this account also carefully attends to ways that each author drew differently on earlier traditions of Christian mysticism.   Evener notes that […]

[1] In this issue, we offer book reviews of three recent publications, the first geared toward families and churches, the second toward academics and the third toward children. [2] The first book, We Carry the Fire by Richard Hoehn, advocates a spirituality defined by action for the common good. Instead of private individual piety, Hoehn argues […]

[1] Richard Hoehn, in his book We Carry the Fire, is arguing for a transformative spirituality in which people are called to go beyond themselves – to carry the “breath of fire” – to be in solidarity with the poor (and the earth) in their struggle for freedom from unjust systems and structures. He is […]