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Editor's Comments |
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Voluntary Poverty in the Economy of the Spirit
by Victor Thasiah
Leslie Hoppe concludes his recent, comprehensive study of the texts dealing with the poor and poverty in Scripture and the Rabbinic tradition with advice on how Christians should respond today. Before offering direction, however, two remarks summarize the book: 1) "that material, economic poverty is an outrage, that it should not exist, [and] that it is not in accord with the divine will"; and, 2) that "the experience of the poor [is] an apt metaphor for the universal need for salvation."
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Featured Articles |
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Addressing Hunger and Poverty Today
by Nancy Arnison
One billion human beings are hungry today. One billion people do not have enough to eat. The number alone is staggering. But what makes it scandalous is the fact that God’s abundant creation — the fertile earth and seas — can produce adequate nutrition for all. Scarcity is not the problem.
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Patristic Christian Views on Poverty and Hunger
by Susan R. Holman
The poor are "living images of God," wrote Martin Luther in 1522, an opinion shared by Ulrich Zwingli, who argued that God "turned all visible cults from himself to the poor." Both reformers knew Johannes Oecolampadius (a co-signatory at Marburg in 1529), whose treatises on poor relief began with his 1519 translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’s fourth-century sermon (Oration 14), "On the love of the poor." |
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Mark’s Gospel, Social Outcasts, and Modern Slavery
by Matthew S. Rindge
Poverty entraps people by ensnaring and entangling them in intricate and inescapable webs of slavery. I use “slavery” not as a metaphor, but as an apt description of what life is like for between twelve and twenty-seven million people today. That there are more slaves today than at any other time in history should give us pause, even if it is only to acknowledge realities too often hidden from those of us in the One-Third World. |
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Who Gets to Eat? Consumption, Complicity, and Poverty
by Shannon Jung
Two of my favorite theologians set the terms of this essay. One, Kathryn Tanner, asserts as her theological base that God gives unconditionally; God gives to all; and that God wills a community of mutual benefit. The other, Craig Nessan of Wartburg Seminary, writes that hunger in a world of abundance is a scandal to Christians and calls for the orthopraxis of relieving world hunger.
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Book Review |
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Review of Reta Halteman Finger, Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts
by David Creech
As the director of hunger education for ELCA World Hunger and a student of the Bible, I am always looking for books and resources that blend good history and theology with contemporary application. Reta Halteman Finger’s 2007 book, Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts, in many ways succeeds in doing just that.
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Coalition for Reform (CORE) Responses |
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Editor's Comment to the CORE Responses
by Kaari Reierson
Our May issue of JLE was one of our most-visited in recent memory. One particular article, in fact, was among the most-visited pages on the entire ELCA site for the second week in May. The corresponding number of emails about Jon Pahl’s article on Lutheran CORE in historical perspective has been among the highest during the years of publishing. |
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Response to Dr. Pahl’s Critique of Lutheran CORE
by Cathy A. Ammlung
As an ordained woman who is a member of Lutheran CORE I find that I cannot remain silent in the face of Dr. Pahl’s florid and sprawling jeremiad against Lutheran CORE. Dr. Pahl contends that Lutheran CORE is a bastion of angry, fearful American civil religionists, rotten to the core with a millennial, white male patriarchal will to power that seeks to impose itself imperialistically upon women and sexual minorities. |
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A Rejoinder to Robert Benne and Cathy A. Ammlung
by Jon Pahl
Firstly, I am grateful to Robert Benne for plugging my new book, Empire of Sacrifice. I don't think it's "brilliant," but I do think its analysis of religious violence in America sheds some light on Lutheran CORE, and especially its Chapter 4, "Sacrificing Sex."
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Cloud of Witnesses |
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C.S. Lewis on the Christian Life
by Gilbert Meilaender
The Christian life hurts. God hurts. That theme is firmly embedded in Lewis’ writings, and it is, I think, the deepest reason for the power of his writing. “The Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is,” Orual reflects in Till We Have Faces. This theme – that God hurts – is perhaps most pronounced in some of Lewis’ last works – especially Till We Have Faces, A Grief Observed, and The Four Loves. |