Government (Civil)

[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 […]

[1] I am honored and delighted that five persons of such stature have taken time to respond to my article on civil religion-“Civil Religion-Destructive, Useless, or Beneficial?” All five responses were helpful, civil, and of high quality. They are fine demonstrations of the kind of moral discourse at which this journal aims. I can only […]

[1] Robert Benne believes that we need “a more positive, yet critical, appropriation of the [American] civil religion” than has been offered us by most Lutherans in this country. Some Lutherans have drawn back because our country’s civil religion seems insufficiently religious, others because it seems too religious (and insufficiently secular). Neither of these strikes […]

[1] Bob Benne’s questions, whether American civil religion offers more than meets the critical neo-orthodox eyes, whether its nationalistic affections may be transformed by the universal perspectives of Abrahamic religions, expresses a magnanimous and inclusive spirit. His essay brings to mind Paul’s generous approach to the Athenians. Paul acknowledges their religiosity (without a word about […]