Ecumenical and/or Inter-religious

1] This past May, six students and I experienced some Middle Eastern “development” in the raw.1 Under a vividly blue, sheltering, desert sky, we worked with local residents to build a small dam not far from Mt. Sinai. All was done by camel and by hand — carrying boulders, scooping sand, mixing mortar, and carrying […]

A review of They Are Us: Lutherans and Immigration by Stephen Paul Bouman and Ralston Deffenbaugh, Augsburg Fortress, 2009. 144 pages. [1] A book this good is worth its weight in gold. Actually, the book weighs about nine ounces, which would make it worth over $9,000. However, although it’s worth its weight in gold, it […]

[1] On October 31, 1999, an historic moment of ecumenical reception for Lutherans and Roman Catholics took place at Augsburg, Germany. The Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification was signed that day by representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican. A decade later, on October 1, 2009, a service will be held […]

[1] Religious groups perpetually dialogue with their sociocultural contexts as they seek to define and maintain their identities as communities of faith. In other words, religious communities are constantly balancing continuity and change.[1] Recent decades have brought a series of rapid political, economic, philosophical, social, and spiritual shifts, and there is a growing movement of […]

1] In less than two decades, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America made significant ecumenical advances and agreements with other Christian churches. Ranging from full communion agreements to bilateral dialogue statements, including the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ), we have seen and celebrated some of the fulfillment envisioned by our Vision for […]

[1] On October 31, 1999, an historic moment of ecumenical reception for Lutherans and Roman Catholics took place at Augsburg, Germany. The Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification was signed that day by representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican. A decade later, on October 1, 2009, a service will be held […]

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 […]

Thesis [1] The essential lines of classical Christian anti-Judaism are by now familiar to many, documented in such seminal works as James Parkes’ The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue and Rosemary Radford Reuther’s Faith and Fratricide and more recently chronicled for readers of the New York Times bestseller list in James Carroll’s Constantine’s […]

[1] In our post-Holocaust era, many Jews have identified with the State of Israel as their last line of defense should the community again come under the threat of eradication. Most Christians, especially in North America, are unable to begin fathoming this possibility. Their communities simply have not been under such a threat. The typical […]