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.
Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul: This lengthy article explores Daniel Dennett’s (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster, 1996)) views on consciousness and physicalism: a materialist view on human nature. Students may find it useful as a conversational introduction to the various current positions on consciousness, soul, and the transcendent: the physicist’s world of matter and […]
Majority of Americans Oppose Transgender Bathroom Restrictions: Here are the current PRRI survey breakdowns on several religion-and-society issues including transgender bathroom laws, church endorsement of political candidates, marriage issues, LGBT issues and more.
Would You Become An Immortal Machine? This brief review of a new book on transhumanism, To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (Doubleday, 2017) asks, Since “The Fall,” we “lost” our god-like immortality, and have been looking for ways to regain it. Can science do this? Is mortality merely a scientific question?
Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court, and Religious Freedom: This essay (in support of the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court) provides an inventory of legal issues related to religious liberty that can help students organize this complex topic. “In the United States, the law of religious freedom and church-state relations can be imperfectly, but still […]
A New Form of Stem Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions: The journal eLife reports that researchers can now produce synthetic embryos by assembling stem cells that will then organize themselves into biological structures. This technique may make it possible to produce specific tissues and organs including synthetic human entities with embryo-like features: SHEEFs. See also Addressing the […]
KRAB zinc-finger proteins contribute to the evolution of gene regulatory networks: the science journal Nature has published new research on transposons, indicating ways in which the human genetics system is species-specific and suggesting the protein activity of “KZFPs contribute to make human biology unique.” See also: The proteins that domesticated our genomes Harnessing the Human […]
How a Christian movement is growing rapidly in the midst of religious decline: Among the five Christ-and-culture perspectives, “INC Christianity is a movement to watch because we think it will continue to draw adherents in large numbers in the future. It will produce a growing number of Christians who see their goal not just as saving […]
Gene Editing: Promise & Peril–Is Caution Enough? This Lutheran bioethics scholar comments on CRISPR: What is deemed necessary is the use of countless embryos—always, of course, with caution and with relief of suffering as the ultimate end in view. [And] there remains one further possibility on the gene-editing horizon. Beyond basic research, there is the possibility […]
Who decides what my body means? The next Reformation is about interpretation, but not of a book: Advanced students may find content to agree and disagree with in this essay on race, gender, identity, and exegetics. The author uses the Reformation as a reference point for reading texts, culture, and the various perceptions of others […]
The New Alarmism: How Some Christians are Stoking Fear Rather Than Hope — Smith responds to some voices within the church who portend the decline of Christianity. “[My] critique is not a progressive dismissal. For nearly a decade I have been trying to diagnose the causes of Christian assimilation to culture in books like Desiring the […]
