Book Reviews

Peters, Rebecca Todd. Solidarity Ethics: Transformation in a Globalized World. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014.

[1] This helpful volume contains essays by Foster McCurley, Samuel Torvend, Carter Lindberg, Eric Gritsch, Carl Uehling, Robert Duea, and Martin Marty. It also includes a summary of a roundtable discussion of the Future’s Group, an informal gathering of chief executive officers of Lutheran social ministry organizations. Topics covered range from the biblical basis for […]

Christian Social Teachings: A Reader in Christian Social Ethics from the Bible to the Present. George W. Forell, Editor, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2013.

Book Review: Gary Laderman. American Civil Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013, 93 pages, E-Book $12.99

Book Review: Soong-Chan Rah. Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church. Chicago: Moody, 2010. 208pp. $14.99.

[1] Christian minjung theologies arose in the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea. They were articulated by a small group of Protestant pastors and intellectuals who became part and parcel of the late 20th century minjung movement—a cultural phenomenon led by artists, students, labor organizers, and intellectuals—that included a retrieval of traditional artistic forms, a […]

(Review: Theologians in Their Own Words. Edited by Derek R. Nelson, Joshua M Moritz, and Ted Peters.) [1] Teacher, social activist and womanist author bell hooks writes, “When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors […]

John Carlson (an ethicist) and Jonathan Ebel (a historian) have brought together a rich collection of essays examining the intersection of religion and violence in America. An early goal of this book was “to show that September 11th was not the United States’ first experience with religion and violence,” through the expertise of scholars writing from within their own disciplines. They discovered that this multidisciplinary approach also brought “new and compelling insights into the complex historical and moral legacy of the United States.”

Instead of focusing his project narrowly on the hot-button sacredness-of-life topics, Gushee comes at the topic more broadly: “If any human life is sacred, every human life is sacred” (3). The sacredness of human life, in this construal, is not simply a religious conviction held only by Christians or certain kinds of philosophers but an ancient conviction of most cultures, period.

[1] In her recent and important book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness (reviewed in this issue), attorney Michelle Alexander calls for a movement on par with the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century in order to overturn the damage caused by the unprecedented incarceration of large portions of […]