Ethics

[1] Successful social change movements begin with persistence in bearing witness from a minority position with regard to the status quo. “To what should I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Luke 13:20-21). So […]

[1] There are three questions I would like to explore, working from a different angle than that Christine Helmer examined regarding the relation between the theological doctrine of justification by faith and ethics. While she critiqued a separation between theology and ethics, I will ponder questions that address temptations to conflate theology and ethics. First, […]

[1] What does theology have to do with ethics? The significance of this question might not be as pressing for Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians as it is for Lutheran theologians and ethicists. Roman Catholic theology has a history of connecting doctrine with moral teachings. Similarly, Reformed theology has historically insisted on the relation of […]

November 5, 2024 [1] Something substantive on the cultural-political landscape changed on the morning after the November 5, 2024 U.S. elections. When Professor Amy Carr and I were writing Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press 2023) in 2022-2023, the political state in the U.S. seemed stuck in […]

[1] This year, 2025, marks the 500th anniversary of Katie and Martin Luther’s wedding.  Notably, Martin Luther wrote in 1519 (six years before his own marriage and seven years before the birth of his first child) that raising children is a parent’s highest calling.  In 1520, in his Letter to the Christian Nobility, he tells […]

[1] As the ELCA finalizes its discussion on civic life and faith and Americans go to the polls for the presidential election, many people are afraid to discuss their stance about politics at church while others proudly proclaim that their views are the only right ones.  Rather than this flight or fight response, we at […]

[1] In the section above we situated the responses to our book in a historical framework of Lutheran thought. We now lean into thinking with some of the questions, concerns, and alternatives offered by our reviewers. [2] Both Justin Nickel and Leah Schade commented that we had not clarified the precise notion of justice presupposed […]

[1] Our book Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times offers conversation as the intersubjective mode we have as persons and Christians for exchanging our respective positions on difficult topics. We thank our interlocutors in this issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics for engaging with themes in our book that resonated with them. We began writing […]

[1] In Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice, Amy Carr and Christine Helmer are concerned with the polarization that runs through our country and congregations.[1] Though this polarization’s content is most often political—think of the red-blue state divide, or our siloing mediated by social media and cable news—Carr and Helmer […]

[1] Amidst a society wrenched apart by forces hell-bent on splintering the body politic as well as the Body of Christ, Amy Carr and Christine Helmer have co-written Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times which offers a theological framework for helping Christians engage in moral discernment and “justice-seeking.” For the authors, the concept of Christian identity […]