Government (Civil)

[1] The question is posed: What should a Christian citizen consider when evaluating the religion of candidates for political office and their appeal to religion in their attempts to get elected and in their efforts to support their legislative initiatives? [2] The classic Lutheran answer to the first part of the question is that frequently […]

1] Published in the darkest days of the Great Depression, presciently warning about Hitler’s rise in Germany, insightfully urging that achievement of greater equality within America is a matter of its own survival, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society is one of those books often referred to but infrequently studied. As we struggle to […]

[1] One of the most important events in United States history is the southern Civil Rights Movement. Although the Civil Rights Movement involved religious leaders and communities of many denominations, this paper focuses on how Lutheranism interacted with the movement. Lutheran involvement in the movement is a milestone in Lutheran history that will possibly be […]

[1] As someone who has known John Stumme since his student days at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in the late 1960s, when I was a young professor there, I am not surprised at the stellar career he has had in the succeeding decades. For already at that time he was a visible […]

[1] Roman Catholicism (RC) is still the major religious force in most of Latin America. It is more than a denomination: it is a powerful social organization with an extraordinary cultural-formative power. Even though Protestants, Evangelicals and Pentecostals have experienced a steady growth during the last century, Catholicism has managed to continue to dominate the […]

[1] In December 1944 the Norwegian Lutheran bishop Eivind Josef Berggrav (1884-1959) was featured on the cover of Time, becoming one of the few protestant religious figures to have been thus honored.1 In 1942, the New York Times chose him as one of the six religious leaders to be profiled in a series headlined “Churchmen […]

[1] “Lutherans in Public” focused on how Lutherans have been, how they are or are not, and how they ought to be participants in the public realm, both as a church and as individual members of it. It was the theme of the 2006 Annual Gathering of Lutheran Ethicists in Scottsdale, Arizona, in January of […]

Introduction: outline and thesis of this essay [1] Is there a specific Lutheran contribution to political ethics in terms of public witness of good works and reflections on the place of good works within politics? The question of “good works” itself diverges from the traditions of political ethics, and is regarded as highly problematic by […]

[1] Coincidentally, the U.S. election comes just two days after the 5th anniversary of the signing by the Catholic and Lutheran churches of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, when we witnessed the potential of theological doctrine to bring together and reconcile forces that had been divided for nearly 500 years. In stark […]

[1] Mark Noll sketches his positions on six issues that he considers to be “paramount,” and declares that he will not be voting in the presidential election because neither of the major parties is “willing to consider the political coherence of this combination of convictions or willing to reason about why their positions should be […]