Law, Systemic Violence and Societal Institutions

A lawsuit is a petition to the court, calling on the court to address your grievance. You're saying that someone has violated a law, or in some cases that a law has violated other laws.

Ultimately you want the court to force the party that has grieved you to change and correct the wrong. The court if it rules in your favour is effectively 'threatening' the other party to make it right. They're telling someone to pay the money owed or in some cases they're telling an entity...a business, a city government or department to change their policy or face the wrath of the court.

Lamech and the Evangelical Culture of Death

I own a few guns but I haven't fired them in many years and have seriously considered getting rid of them. I'm not sure how. For different moral reasons, I don't want to sell them nor would I want to hand them over to the government.

Stewardship and Parable Inversion- Concluding Thoughts

When the Church shifted and was transformed by Constantinianism, many old values and ways of thinking had to be abandoned in order to create the new Christendom, which ended up being anything but Christian. Power and money are always wedded and in order for the Church to embrace a political order it had to change the way it thought about itself in the world.

Stewardship and Parable Inversion

Speaking of terms and terminology it is worthy to note how the term 'stewardship' is used in such radically different ways.

Everyone more or less acknowledges that in a Christian framework our possessions and assets do not actually belong to us but to God Himself.

And at that point all agreement ends.

Pietism, Higher Criticism and the Prussian Union of 1817

Over the years I have encountered numerous Missouri Synod Lutherans who continually rail against Pietism. I mean they really have very strong feelings about it. I was reminded of this recently when I listened to podcast dealing with the Prussian Union of 1817.

Technology Tangles: Ethics, Politics, Euthanasia and the Avoidance of the Real Questions at Stake (Part 2 of 2)

The technology has brought us to a point where we have to ask these difficult and sometimes impossible questions about how far do we dare to go? What is basic to humanity?

Technology Tangles: Ethics, Politics, Euthanasia and the Avoidance of the Real Questions at Stake

Recently there's been a great deal of secular and Christian news coverage, regarding a woman in her late twenties that is planning to take her own life. She has a terminal brain tumor and though she has not yet manifested symptoms, she has been given a fairly short prognosis. Rather than wait until the suffering begins or resort to palliative care she has elected to end her life. She lives in a state that allows doctors to prescribe pharmaceuticals which will permit her to do this efficiently.