Military, War, Armed Conflict

[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 […]

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 […]

[1] Journal of Lutheran Ethics asked persons who had written earlier in JLE on Iraq to write once again in light of current circumstances. JLE asked them to address the question: “What does the United States owe Iraq? What obligations does the U.S. have toward Iraq?” [2] Six writers take up the challenge. They all […]

This article is the seventh chapter of Professor Simpson’s War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just-War Tradition, available from Augsburg Fortress Press. It is reprinted in JLE by permission. Four Global Challenges [1] In this final chapter I introduce four global challenges as we ponder God’s preferential future for earthly peace. First, we will look […]

[1] On January 26, 2007 Bishop Mark S. Hanson called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to conversation on Iraq: “Our country is engaged in a divisive debate about the nature and the direction of this war… As the war in Iraq escalates and the way to a lasting peace seems unclear, how shall […]

[1] One striking feature of the continuing U.S. debate about the Iraq War is that the Iraqi civilian victims are absent from the discussion. We-the U.S. voting public-simply don’t know very much about what they want, and particularly what they want from us. We occasionally hear the cries of victims in news reports, and often […]

[1] The issue addressed to the symposium concerns the nature of U.S. obligations to Iraq. The language of obligation suggests the editors of JLE have in mind a moral question, and, indeed, there is a moral question here, although it is of a certain sort. More precisely, the question of U.S. obligation to Iraq is […]

1] Published in the darkest days of the Great Depression, presciently warning about Hitler’s rise in Germany, insightfully urging that achievement of greater equality within America is a matter of its own survival, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society is one of those books often referred to but infrequently studied. As we struggle to […]

An Ethical Critique of Christian Zionism [1] As an Arab Palestinian Evangelical Lutheran Christian who grew up as a refugee, questions about the land and theology of Palestine/Israel are not just theological or philosophical exercises to me. They involve all that I am and all that I hold sacred in my life as a Palestinian […]

[1] What is Zionism? What is Christian Zionism? Let’s try to develop some working definitions before we visit the pros and cons of a movement that seems to be attracting a fair amount of attention today. [2] A simple definition could be, “Zionism supports the return, or the various returns, of the Jewish people to […]