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[1] Anticipation and anxiety continue to mount as the ELCA Churchwide Assembly draws near. The Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies stands in the forefront of many minds bringing with it a flood of commentaries, petitions, and conversations. All corners of the ELCA including theologians, congregations, seminarians, and clergy have voiced nuanced perspectives on the […]

The Scene of the Compromise [1] The recommendations on ministry policy made by the Task Force for the ELCA Studies on Sexuality and coming before the 2009 Churchwide Assembly have provoked disparate responses from differing constituencies within the ELCA. The report of the task force itself includes as an appendix two dissenting positions from members […]

[1] A few months ago, I taught a class on sexuality for our 9th grade confirmation students. As the class began, I asked them to write on an index card what they believed the bible said about sex. To a student, all 22 responses were the same: “if you have sex before marriage, you’ll go […]

[1] Richard John Neuhaus was a Lutheran for most of his 72 years. He was a Lutheran pastor longer than he was a Roman Catholic priest. He wrote his most widely discussed book while he was a Lutheran. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1990, the piety and theology he absorbed as a Lutheran continued […]

[1]The early years of the Reformation were marked by sharp disagreement between Protestant proponents of the Lutheran notion of justification and Catholic reactionaries who, in their response to the threat of the reformers, accused their opponents of antinomianism and retreated to a casuistic notion of natural law that had dominated theology since the rise of […]

[1] This article arises from the conviction that preaching from the Bible is “standing between two worlds,” a communication between the ancient biblical text and modern listeners.1 Preachers are bridges for the truth of the Word. The bridge building metaphor leads to the fact that reaching involves self-disclosure. The speaker and the message are inseparable. As Arnold states, […]

[1] As the 2008 presidential primary season fast approaches, the question of how the Christian citizen should evaluate candidates could turn out to be more interesting than it’s been in some time. [2] The religion-in-politics question usually is focused on Republicans. That has been the case since conservative Christians became a formidable, cohesive political force […]

[1] There is a very good chance that the 2008 Republican nominee for President will, for the first time in party history, not be a Protestant but rather a Roman Catholic or a Mormon. Historically, the Republican Party has been the party of America’s Protestants, both Mainline and, more recently, evangelical. Not long ago, the […]

[1] Perhaps few times, if ever, in the history of the United States have questions about the religion of a candidate for President been more prominent than in the 1960 election. Citizens vigorously debated and many cast their votes on how they answered this question: Does the Roman Catholicism of John F. Kennedy disqualify him […]

[1] A recent development in the just war tradition has been to identify a third stage of war: the time after hostilities cease. The requirements of justice do not stop at the moment of a ceasefire, but continue through activities such as repatriation of captured soldiers, war crimes trials, and reparations. Such obligations have long […]