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.
Public Morality and Allegedly Private Vice: From the Journal of Christian Legal Thought, this brief article can introduce students to the continuing disputes and key names in issues of victim-less crime, personal vice that becomes public, and society’s stake in what begins with but does not remain private.
How a new generation is changing evangelical Christianity: This profile on young evangelical Christians reports a shift away from the previous generation’s Moral Majority to “focusing their attention, instead, on improving the lives of people in their local communities.” Possibly useful for courses on church and society, the sociology of religion, local mission, and the various […]
Congress Passes State Department Authorization Act Including Various Religious Liberty Provisions: This House / Senate bill, S1635, includes at least 9 provisions related to religious liberty and religious discrimination, goes to the President for signature.
The Role of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools in the Renewal of American Democracy: (Note–one free download) By virtue of their public role, law schools have an obligation to address the breakdown of democracy in order to understand and try to ameliorate it. That task is currently unfulfilled by law schools, which are distracted by marketing […]
Calvin Prof on ‘Radical’ Watchlist: Assistant Professor of Social Work Joseph Kuilema at Calvin College provides this report and response to his name being placed on a website watchlist project of Turning Point USA, whose mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.
McConnell on the Relationship of Tradition and Law: This 60 min. video offers a wide-ranging discussion of why traditions are not wooden and static and how they relate to the law. Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell is a constitutional law scholar who served as a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for […]
Jesus for Atheists (and Agnostics and Nones and Everyone Else): Students can read this interview as an intro to the history of non-Christians stumbling across Jesus and their efforts to interpret and reinterpret his words and works. Such a study might begin with Marcion or perhaps Simon Magus in Acts 8.
Research Says: Young People Don’t Want Hip Pastors — Researchers at the Fuller Youth Institute report on a four-year study of congregations that are effectively engaging 15- to 29-year-olds. The 250 evangelical, mainline, and Catholic churches studied represent more than 20 denominations, in nearly 40 states, ranging from new plants to churches more than a century […]
Whose Utopia Is This Anyway? — This medium-length article can introduce students to themes related to Utopian colonies of the past and present with attention to beliefs about the perfectibility of humankind,feminism, the nature of family, a biblical anthropology, and overlaps with the church. “To understand Utopian experiments—what worked for their participants and, more crucially, […]
‘I was in prison and you came to me’: Lutherans well-suited for ministry to incarcerated: This ministry of mercy and healing is one about which many in Synod are under-informed. “Behind the barbed wire and watch towers languishes someone’s son or daughter, father or mother, brother or sister who desperately long to hear that Jesus loves them […]
