Items included on this page come from a variety of sources. The perspectives conveyed may or may not express a Lutheran ethos. They can serve our instruction as discussion-starters, examples (positive and negative), and illustrations of intersections between God’s two kingdoms, intersections sometimes characterized by tension, sometimes by congruence. Inclusion does not imply endorsement.
Christians and Lawsuits: The usual starter text for law suits is 1 Cor. 6:1-8. ADF is among the better known Christian legal services and presents four factors to explain when and why the church may use a culture’s legal system to engage in litigation (citing Calvin here, though Luther addressed this concern also as he […]
Keep Christianity Weird: This review of Destroyer of the Gods by Larry Hurtado (Baylor, 2016), 304 pages, notes that book reminds us how weird Christianity was to the Roman world. Christianity’s sheer familiarity has desensitized us to its radical claims. Hurtado aims to show how the “odd” became “commonplace,” by surveying the first three centuries of the Jesus […]
Christian Human Rights: A Debate — The annunciation of human rights in the 1940s is now viewed by the general public and professional scholars as the uncomplicated triumph of liberal democracy. But it is equally if not more viable to regard human rights as a project of the Christian right, not the secular left. Their […]
Meg Meeker, MD, on Teenagers and the STD nobody is talking about: Most people are aware of the physical repercussions of sex–we e now have 35 known STDs (in 1960, we only had two); teenagers make up one-third of the U.S. population, but they carry 50 percent of STDs; one in four teens has an STD. […]
China, once officially atheist, now booming with religion: China is experiencing one of the great religious revivals of our time. Across China, hundreds of temples, mosques and churches open each year, attracting millions of new worshippers. Faith and values are returning to the center of a national discussion over how to organize Chinese life. This is not […]
A Just Welcome: The Center for Public Justice (chiefly a Reformed theology orientation) has completed its 7 part series on refugees, the Bible, and public policy. The series could be used in a companion/comparison study of similar documents from CTCR studies of the LC-MS, from the ELCA, and from the United States Council of Catholic […]
Why We Forgo Self-Interest for Others’ Sake: The research linked here and in the study from Nature Neuroscience below addresses the issue of moral development and altruism. Students will benefit both from learning the current state of these studies but also by learning how to frame the underlying ontological questions that research cannot answer and […]
Weaving Ch. 13 Back into Romans: Christians typically read Romans 13 as a stand-alone passage, and this can lead to misreadings. In Romans, Paul categorically rules out any action of collective or individual revenge as inconsistent with our being transfigured by Christ. This prohibition may seem almost trivial today. But not so long ago, punishment by […]
Pew: Here’s How Badly Soviet Atheism Failed in Europe — “The comeback of religion in a region once dominated by atheist regimes is striking,” states Pew in its latest report. Today, only 14 percent of the region’s population identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nones,” reports the Pew Research Center on the surge of Christianity in Europe […]
Science and Pseudo-Science: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has substantially updated its entry on science and pseudo-science (April 11, 2017). The discussion can help students realize the epistemological difficulties in sorting out data, hypothesis, information, theory, and ontology. The new treatment emphasizes “that there is much more agreement on particular cases of demarcation than […]
