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.
In this assessment of ethical theory in current bioethics, David S. Oderberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, UK, discusses six current confusions and errors in agenda-driven bioethics studies and reports: “You could say they misunderstand the function of argument, which is to get to the truth, not to advance a previously-adopted policy.” […]
Officials closed all schools in Augusta County, VA, as a safety precaution when parents were distressed by a world geography assignment from the schools’ standard textbook in world religions. The assignment:”Here is the shahada, the Islamic statement of faith, written in Arabic. In the space below, try copying it by hand. This should give you […]
How secular Americans are reshaping funeral rituals: Students can examine the trend toward cremation as a pattern in sociology, business, religion, family studies, ritual expression, and psychology. According to estimates by the funeral industry’s main trade group, 2015 is on track to be the year that cremation surpasses burial for the first time, as a long-standing […]
The GetReligion monitor site on news coverage of religion offers this overview of the case and how it has been reported. School officials at Castle Elementary School in Johnson County, KY, have edited the Luke nativity text out of the script of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” This case may be of interest for courses in theater, […]
From KUOW.org in Seattle, this in-depth human-interest analysis can serve as a case study for issues of law and religion, adolescent age-of-consent, health care decisions, and similar two-kingdoms tensions. Dennis Lindberg was 14 when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He refused to received blood transfusions, which ultimately led to his death three weeks after he was […]
Why We Cannot Compromise — an essay on whether civil consensus is possible in some areas of cultural dissent: the West is increasingly incapable of engaging in true debate, achieving broad consensus, and reaching compromises about our most important controversies. Students in political science, theology, the social sciences, and communication can consider when discourse is possible […]
Students may use this piece to examine and compare Enlightenment liberty with Christian liberty. In “Rethinking Lockean Liberty,” reviewer Daryl Charles reviews God, Locke, and Liberty by Joseph Loconte (Lexington, 2014): The central burden of Loconte’s treatise is that despite renewed scholarly attention to Locke, the religious character of A Letter Concerning Toleration has been slighted. Due to […]
How do we understand suffering through a theology of the cross? This question allows for an open dialogue with the subject allowing for a fuller exploration of the topic at hand. The question that most people are really asking is how to understand suffering. The answer to this question can only rightly be understood through […]
New from Oxford University Press (280 pages): The New Atheist movement uses Darwinism to diminish the authority of religious institutions and belief systems and have embraced it as a metaphor for the gradual replacement of religious faith with secular reason. They have posed as harbingers of human progress, claiming the moral high ground, and rejecting with intolerance […]
Students in history, politics, and geography can use this brief article, The Church Under Putin: Nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy, to consider two-kingdoms themes in an important culture outside our own. The Orthodox Church aligns itself closely with the government. Yet its leaders have also offered some help to movements that challenge the status quo.
