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 […]
Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, says judge: A major inquiry into the place of religion in modern society has published this position, provoking a furious backlash from ministers and the Church of England. A two-year commission involving leading religious leaders from all faiths, calls for public life in […]
When Corporations Turned on Social Conservatives–the Indiana Affair: a 30 min. video interview with Professor Patrick Deneen who discusses the March 2015 controversy over Indiana’s religious freedom legislation when corporate America weighed in on the controversy. Deneen explains what that sudden partisanship by Big Business means for the future. Students can consider Deneen’s views on conservatism, progressivism, […]
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 […]
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.
A student at Concordia St. Paul is demanding protections for gays and lesbians after she said her relationship with another woman cost her a leadership role with a student-led worship group. Nikki Hagan, 19, said the student president of Concordia’s “908 Student Ministry” asked her to resign her informal post as the group’s message coordinator soon […]
