Book Review Introductions

[1] Our first review launches a periodic series of reviews covering books reflecting Native American experiences and issues. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah is reviewed in light of the ELCA’s action and inaction on these matters. The authors address the damaging theology and […]

This month our three book reviews address guns and political beliefs.  The first two books offer insights directly relevant to gun violence and gun control debates.  These books are reviewed by two ELCA pastors living in Montana.  Rev. Jean Larson, who also served as Faith Outreach Leader for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in […]

[1] We begin with a book that, though 30 years old, speaks to our current situation as if it was written yesterday.  Reviewing Parker Palmer’s, The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America’s Public Life, Stewart Herman discovers wisdom for navigating the social isolation of our pandemic era.  More broadly, he finds fruitful insights […]

This issue is published at a time when individuals, families, and communities are experiencing the upending of daily life.  COVID-19 dominates our consciousness as we grapple with its implications for  health, economics and social relations.   These book reviews may offer a brief respite.  They consider big picture theological questions of beauty and creation.  Diane Yeager […]

In this issue of the journal we highlight four books addressing animals and climate change. Dr. Stephen Crocco, Director of the Library at Yale Divinity School, reviews David Clough’s large two-volume work, On Animals, which brings both systematic theology and theological ethics to bear on the ways Christian human animals live with non-human animals who […]

The book reviews in this issue carry forward the theme of dialogue found in the essays.  First, Sarah Bereza reviews Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide by Leah D. Schade.  Schade proposes a sermon-dialogue-sermon model for eliciting grace-filled conversations about divisive topics.   Next, we pioneer a new format for a Journal of Lutheran Ethics […]

​ [1] Summer reading is often wide-ranging.  We dip into genres outside our typical work to explore worlds beyond our everyday existence.  This book review issue honors that summertime trend as it explores ethical dimensions in literature, science, Buddhism, and Womanist Sass. [2] Diane Yeager takes us into the world of secular literature through the […]

n this issue our book and resource reviews are focused on climate change. In an interdisciplinary approach, ethicists review works prompted by science and produced by journalists and a natural historian. Stewart Herman reviews and compares two recent books, The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail (2019) and The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells (2019). Herman brings an ethicist’s eye and a theological lens to these two works on climate change written by journalists.

[1] In this issue our book and resource reviews are focused on climate change.  In an interdisciplinary approach, ethicists review works prompted by science and produced by journalists and a natural historian. [2] Stewart Herman reviews and compares two recent books, The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail (2019) and The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells (2019).  Herman brings […]

Themes of theology and culture run throughout this issue, intersecting specifically in treatments of war, moral injury, climate justice, and faith/life formation for adults and children.

This issue begins with a focus on war. Ted Peters offers an essay inspired by Kelly Denton-Borhaug’s War Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation. The ethos and institutions of war have penetrated everyday life in the United States, taking the symbols of Christianity and repurposing them for nationalistic ends. In the process, what Americans consider holy has migrated from the sacred to the secular, from the church to the state. Peters challenges public theology with the task of discerning U.S. war-culture and constructing a prophetic response. This is a wake up call.