Book Reviews

[1] E.W. Mueller (1908–1993) was for many years the Secretary of Church in Town and Country for the National Lutheran Council. The NLC was a cooperative venture among Lutherans during the mid-20th century. At a time when Lutherans were split in several different denominational organizations, the NLC provided cooperative programming of benefit to the churches. […]

[1] To read Reinhold Niebuhr is pure pleasure; to read his disciples less so. The book, with a forward by Martin Marty and an introduction by Daniel F. Rice, seeks, as the title says, to revisit and engage with our greatest public intellectual of the twentieth century. Given that as an ethicist, Niebuhr’s applications are […]

[1] When America learned the President of the United States identified Reinhold Niebuhr as a person who influenced him, I imagine many people scurried to probe more deeply into the nature of Niebuhr’s ethical and political thinking. Of course, there were people wondering who Reinhold Niebuhr is. I imagine some people saw this as an […]

1] In the midst of Christian debates on sexuality that ultimately rest on various biblical hermeneutical schools and practices, Patricia Beattie Jung and Aana Marie Vigen have edited a multi-faceted volume on human sexuality that challenges an overriding focus in Christian theological discourse on one normative source, Scripture. As a whole, the volume’s contributors offer […]

See also Daniel M. Bell, Jr.’s Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering by Paul R. Hinlicky [1] Does life in twenty-first century America involve compromises of the soul unlike anything else in the history of the Christian faith? Is being Christian more difficult in an affluent, market-driven, consumerist society […]

See also Daniel M. Bell, Jr.’s Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering by Paul R. Hinlicky I am grateful for the care and charity with which Professor Hinlicky read the book. I hope the comments that follow reflect the same. — Daniel Bell [1] Capitalism. Professor Hinlicky asks why […]

[1] Thomas Aquinas’s theology of charity testifies throughout to Paul’s proclamation that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5).1 Charity is a supernatural virtue, infused by God the Trinity in order not only to heal the fallen human will, but also to […]

[1] In his 1990 classic, The Restructuring of American Religion, sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow observed that a seismic restructuring occurred in American religion during the decades following World War II. In his estimation, denominational identities during that time were diminishing in salience, giving way to a realignment of American religion into conservative and liberal […]

[1] I am grateful to Book Review Editor Michael Shahan for the invitation to respond to Mark Mattes [see Response to Hinlicky’s “Paths Not Taken”, May 2010, Vol. 10, No. 5.], even as I am honored by the elaborate attention Mattes has paid to my recent book, Paths Not Taken (hereafter PNT). Shahan rightly says […]

This paper was originally presented at the International Luther Research Congress Porto Alegre, Brazil in July 2007. [1] In the later part of the twentieth century and continuing to the present day, there has been a resurgence of interest in the doctrine of vocation. Nearly all of these studies to a greater or lesser degree […]