Issue: February 2014: Climate Change

As global​ climate change​ increases in its rate and effects, an energetic and faithful conversation about the related ethical issues also grows in urgency. This issue of Journal of​ Lutheran Ethics offers two presentations by Larry Rasmussen to the 2014 Lutheran Ethicists Gathering that explore this challenge. Dr. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of […]

​Rasmussen writes that scientists have concluded that we have entered a new geological age due to human activity. We are now having a bigger impact on the natural environment than ever before, changing mountains, oceans, even the atmosphere itself. What should the moral or ethical response be when so-called natural disasters are the result of humans, particularly when the people who create the problems are not the people who suffer the worst effects?

After establishing that the Earth is entering a new period, the Anthropocene, Rasmussen uses the legacy of the Reformation, along with the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to explore how humans need to enter a new Reformation in which we truly recognize the planet as sacred and treat it as such.