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Editor's Introduction |
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Annual Book Review Issue
by Ryan P. Cumming
Summer is here, that wonderful season for working through the stack of books that has piled up over the year or for browsing the catalogs and shelves in search of new titles. It is also time for Journal of Lutheran Ethics’ annual book review issue, and this election year we have several titles pertaining to religion and politics. |
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Book Reviews/Conversation |
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May's Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics
by Jesse Perillo
William F. May has already gifted us with an elucidation of how code, contract, and covenant serve as important lenses in understanding the different relationships within the realm of health care. In this book he extends and expands these critical distinctions in his treatment of American politics. At the heart of the book is the attempt to understand how living by contract or covenant affects one’s disposition to communal and political life. |
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Testing the National Covenant: A Covenantal Political Ethic for Lutherans?
by Ronald Duty
After evaluating May’s argument, this essay will consider what his covenantal prescription may mean for Lutheran political ethics, which traditionally has not appealed to covenantal notions or language. I will argue that Lutheran ethicist Stewart Herman’s conviction that a covenantal model is more compatible with a Lutheran political ethic than many have supposed is accurate. |
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Response: A Lutheran Covenantal Political Ethic?
by William F. May
My book largely contrasts a covenantal with a contractual political ethic. Duty believes that a covenantal political ethic might be more aptly contrasted with the broad sweep of liberalism in the modern era. In response, I will try to continue the conversation, but, first, as authors are wont to do, by retrieving briefly, as I see it, the choice I made in organizing the book. |
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Resources for the struggle
by Stewart W. Herman
I will take Ron Duty’s question and reframe it in light of May’s claim: what Lutheran theological and ethical resources might be enlisted in the struggle against inordinate fears and appetites that so dominate American public life? Are there theological convictions or enduring moral values that Lutherans might bring into debates about foreign policy, energy policy, immigration policy, and other issues that have so distorted our political discourse? |
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Review: Migrations of the Holy: God, State and the Political Meaning of the Church
by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.
It is widely remarked that postmodernity is characterized by a certain “return to religion.” Bill Cavanaugh’s Migrations of the Holy might aptly be described as a work that simultaneously reflects and interrogates religion’s political resurgence in this postmodern era. It is a potent work of political theology by one of the leading voices articulating a new Christian theopolitical vision that espouses a forthrightly and unapologetically political church. As such, it will undoubtedly disturb the priests and prophets of modernity of all ideological persuasions.
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Review: Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict that Changed American Christianity
by Christopher Richmann
In 1839, Martin Stephan brought about 700 Saxons to Missouri to flee the liberal and rationalist developments in Saxony and nearby Prussia. One hundred and thirty years later, these Lutherans were up against the same enemy—this time from within, and this time they chose to fight rather than flee. |
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Review: Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire
by Ryan P. Cumming
There are few authors as adept as Mark Lewis Taylor at navigating the fine line between incisive, biting commentary and partisan polemics. Whether he is writing about the criminal justice system (in The Executed God) or the cooptation of religion by repressive political regimes (in the present book), his agenda is clear: the deconstruction of the center and the end of marginalization.
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Featured Article |
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The Ethics of Missional Church
by Clint Schnekloth
I have two aims in this essay. First, I would like to respond to the self-confidence of the missional movement with a set of questions that raises the level of self-awareness and self-critique. Second, I would like to bring to awareness in the professional ethicist community that there is a wide-open field of inquiry (missional ethics), with very little systematic work having been done in the field. |