On October 25, many churches will once again observe “Reformation Sunday,” commemorating the day in 1517 when Martin Luther is said to have nailed his Ninety-Five Theses concerning theological reform on the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg, Saxony. This event continues to be regarded as . . . . Continue Reading »
Did the “Protestant Future” hubbub leave you longing for an Evangelical Catholic Church? It already exists. It’s called Lutheranism. Continue Reading »
What is distinctively Lutheran is to think of ourselves first as catholic—as catholics who found at a certain point in history that they needed to reform the . . . . Continue Reading »
My family and I moved last summer, moving to Valparaiso, Indiana from Oberlin, Ohio, where we had lived for eighteen years. Now, eighteen years is a reasonably long time in anyone’s life. It constitutes the bulk of the life of my children, and almost the entire life of several of them. It is by . . . . Continue Reading »
No Other Gospel! Christianity Among The World Religions by carl e. braaten fortress press, 142 pages, $10.95 Carl Braaten gives us here a spirited and well-grounded affirmation of the centrality and finality, the uniqueness and universality, of Jesus Christ, and a frontal assault . . . . Continue Reading »
In the January issue, this section carried a commentary titled “The Catholic Church as Interest Group.” Among the points made was that, despite the bishops’ declared intention, a statement such as “Political Responsibility,” issued by the United States Catholic Conference (USCC), is in . . . . Continue Reading »
There are numerous obstacles to making the connections between religion and public life. For some moderns, a quasi-religious commitment to secularism produces an overt hostility to religion in all its manifestations. For many others, religion is self-evidently a purely private phenomenon. In that . . . . Continue Reading »
To the extent that Lutherans are noticed at all by non-Lutherans in America, impressions can be wildly contradictory. From one perspective, they can look like mildly exotic ethnics—sort of like the Mennonites, only more numerous. Thus it is possible for interested outsiders to smile . . . . Continue Reading »
It is a longstanding commonplace in Christian thought that Protestantism distinguishes its moral theology from that of Roman Catholicism by its rejection of natural law. The idea of natural law has long formed the spinal column of Catholic social teaching. Modern Protestantism, by contrast, has no . . . . Continue Reading »
Maybe we have been too hard on the editorial page of the most influential of our parish newspapers. Over the years, the New York Times’ editorial writers have been indifferent or hostile to the role of religion in our common life. Any impingement of religion on spheres that . . . . Continue Reading »
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