Items included for this subject area 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.
Stewardship, justice, and moral imperative–Lutherans, Catholics, and other Christians move the needle on environmental concerns. Wherever one’s views may be on climate change, those who believe it needs attention may need to look to those who believe in more than the environment alone. “As climate negotiators struggle in Paris, some scientists who appealed to the […]
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 […]
This edition of Comment, edited by James K.A. Smith, explores the relationship between memory and tradition. In our devotion to progress and technology, we lopped off our memory–as if tradition was what was holding us back. But it turns out forgetting hobbles progress too. A biblical imagination remembers forward. The remembering enjoined by the Torah looks forward […]
Students can agree and disagree with well-known Christian writer Philip Yancey in his article, Paris and Beyond: J. Dudley Woodberry, a specialist in Islam at Fuller Theological Seminary, asks, Is the Muslim my enemy or my brother? His answer: both. A central difference exists between the two faiths. One, born at Pentecost, thrives cross-culturally and even […]
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.
From the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University: “OKWU is not a ‘safe place,’ but rather, a place to learn–to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with […]
Law professor Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? (published in 2013) proposes three affirmative reasons. The reviewer agrees with Leiter’s third conclusion, but for legal reasons argues to deny the first two: 1) singling out religion and 2) granting religious exceptions: “It is difficult, however, to appreciate them if one reduces religion to just a matter of religious conscience.” […]
The New Dignity: Gnostic, Elitist, Self-Destructive Will-to-Power: “Human dignity is grounded in our ability to defy nature—to go beyond natural limitations and thereby create ourselves anew. But in a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, and no intrinsic meaning, human dignity is founded on nothing more than a self-creating will to power that […]
Forensic Pseudoscience – The Unheralded Crisis of Criminal Justice: No human endeavor is completely without error, and one might wonder just how systemic the problems of forensic science truly are. The claim of crisis is far from universally shared. But the problem is therefore not that forensic science is wrong, but that it is hard to know when it […]
