Book Reviews

[1] Regular readers of The Journal of Lutheran Ethics may be surprised to see a review of a novel in this issue.  Most of the reviews in these pages are spent, correctly, I think, on considerations of non-fiction and scholarly books that are concerned more directly with ethics and theology.  Occasionally, however, a novel comes […]

[1] Years ago, I was speaking with a professor of Church history, when he asked, what if 10,000 years from now Christians are looking back on this period as the early Church? The question immediately challenged the way I had imagined Church history. And the new perspective stuck with me. Reframing is a powerful tool […]

[1] The day I started writing this essay a review of a new musical appeared in the New York Times under the headline, “History Always Gets To Sing the Last Note.”  According to Demian Wheeler in Religion within the Limits of History Alone, history gets to sing the first note as well.  It is history […]

“To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.” Mark Nepo [1] We humans are on an unprecedented hinge of history. It’s hard to imagine a more apocalyptic accretion of worldwide catastrophes: among them the most lethal pandemic in a century; the dismantling of formerly stalwart democracies; […]

[1] Our personal security is more of a fantasy than we can comfortably admit, and appeals to national security can conceal the darkest chambers of social bigotry. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eighty years ago on February 19, 1942, devastated the lives of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent (Nikkei) […]

[1] In 1989, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon published Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, arguing that the end of Christendom in the West arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, the night the Fox Theatre opened on a Sunday evening. “The Fox Theatre went head to head with the church over who would provide the […]

[1] Don’t Look Up, a much-discussed movie that came out on Netflix in December 2021, posits a comet heading towards the Earth that will wipe out life on the planet. The comet is intended to represent the coming catastrophe of climate change, and the movie satirizes the denialism, greed, and disinterest paralyzing the discussion and […]

[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 […]

[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 […]