Race, Ethnicity, Racism

West, Traci C. Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter. Lexington, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, 216 pages, paperback, $29.95.

Book Review: Soong-Chan Rah. Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church. Chicago: Moody, 2010. 208pp. $14.99.

Imagining Undocumented Immigrants [1] What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What images do those words elicit in your mind, and what feelings and emotions do those images evoke? Compassion? Pity? Anger? Puzzlement? Anxiety? Admiration? Indifference? Those are probably not easy questions to answer, even if you happen to be an undocumented immigrant yourself! However, […]

The tragic death of Trayvon Martin has raised many issues for Americans in particular. The authors of the two articles in this edition of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics explore a couple of these issues in light of the Christian faith.

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, Cheryl Pero uses the framework of Luther’s catechism to ask: “will we use this opportunity to expose, explore, and exorcize our racial problems or continue to pretend that we live in a “post-racial” society, in a state of denial?”

Benjamin Taylor offers a theological and ethical reflection on the “Stand Your Ground” law, examining its legal ramifications and its relation to Christian ethics. Taylor observes, “…although our country may stand divided for the moment, we do believe in the power of the reconciling love of the cross, the power which defeats death and gathers the people of God together once more.”

Social statements of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America provide guidance to the church and its members on a variety of issues. Given the historical legacy of racism in the United States, this social statement focuses on and explores the question, “How, then, shall we live?”

[1] June 14, 2011, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her first novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, (henceforth UTC) converted thousands of readers to the anti-slavery cause. Stowe’s story ran as a serial in the anti-slavery paper National Era and then appeared as a book in 1852. It became the bestseller […]

[1] In 2007, over 7.3 million people in the United States were under some form of correctional supervision, including federal and state prison inmates (1.6 million), jail inmates (almost 800,000), those on probation (over 4 million), and those on parole (about 800,000).[1] This means that 1 in every 31 adults in the United States is […]

[1] My first response to seeing a series of pictures of the decimated Port-Au-Prince after the January 12th earthquake was “How will they build factories now?”1 Prior to that date many of us concerned with the desperate state of things in Haiti had been focused on the man-made disaster that was currently in the making […]