Government (Civil)

Setting the Table: The Retrieval of Civil Society [1] It is no accident that Habermas revised his sociological theory in the early 1990s by attending more closely to civil society. Already before the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern European dissidents were focusing on the renewal of civil society, even in the […]

[1] In Minnesota, the ever-controversial Governor Jesse Ventura is under fire for declaring this 4th of July “Indivisible Day” at the suggestion of the Atheists of Minnesota for Human Rights. In the wake of a federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel decision declaring that the language “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance violates […]

[1] The recent controversy concerning the status of treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees at the Guantanamo base in Cuba offers an occasion for reflection about the seriousness with which our government undertakes its legal obligations. [2] When the U.S. signed the Geneva Conventions in 1949 which govern, among other things, the treatment of persons […]

[1] Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the United Nations, recently received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the U.N. In his speech at the award ceremonies Dr. Annan observed that humankind is entering the 21st Century through “a gate of fire.” He was referring, of course, to the calamitous events of September […]

Copyright © 1994, Word & World, Luther Seminary. Word & World, Supplement Series 2, pp. 83-95. First published in Luther and Culture, ed. George Forell, Harold Grimm, and Theodore Hoelty-Nickel (Decorah, Iowa: Luther College Press, 1960) and delivered first as a lecture presented at the 1959 “Luther Lectures” at Luther College. Used with permission. [1] […]

Copyright © 1994, Word& World, Luther Seminary. Word & World, Supplement Series 2, pp. 108-122. First published under the title “Domestic Politics” in Luther and Culture, ed. George Forell, Harold Grimm, and Theodore Hoelty-Nickel (Decorah, Iowa: Luther College Press, 1960) and delivered first as a lecture presented at the 1959 “Luther Lectures” at Luther College. […]

Copyright © 1994, Word & World, Luther Seminary. Word & World, Supplement Series 2, pp. 96-107. First published under the title “Foreign Policy” in Luther and Culture, ed. George Forell, Harold Grimm, and Theodore Hoelty-Nickel (Decorah, Iowa: Luther College Press, 1960) and delivered first as a lecture presented at the 1959 “Luther Lectures” at Luther […]

Originally published in The Dispatch, Moline, Illinois, January 20, 2002. Used with permission. [1] In Mere Christianity, a widely-read book published shortly after World War II, C.S. Lewis suggests that we should forgive everyone, even the Gestapo, Hitler’s hated secret police viewed by many as the most wicked of the wicked. [2] For many today, […]

[1] Osama bin Laden and his mentor Sayyid Qutb are fundamentalists. So are Jerry Falwell and, in a slightly more complicated (because also pentecostalist), Pat Robertson. [2] Bin Laden & Co. are Muslims, who would rather kill you than let you connect them in any way with Protestant fundamentalists. Jerry Falwell & Co. are Christians, […]

[1] On a recent flight to Pittsburgh, several professors from a near-by university sat behind me discussing the danger of mixing religion and politics, particularly if the mixing is done by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, whom my fellow academicians compared to Islamicists like Osama Ben Laden. That outrageous and false comparison […]