What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? The philosopher will tell us that there is no answer, that it is a paradox. He has the luxury of throwing up his hands. But the ...irresistible force of Free Exercise has been meeting the immovable object of antiestablishment for 200 years in American courtrooms. And American jurists have had to rough fit an answer. It is no mean feat to weigh two such lofty ideals. We might be more than charitable in accepting and forgiving error made in good faith, were it not thought the importance of the ideals demanded a more rigorous standard.This past June, the United States Supreme Court handed down its latest landmark decision operating in these interstices of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer,2 the Court held that Free Exercise requires the state to provide financial benefits to religious entities on equal terms, notwithstanding the state' s interest in antiestablishment.3 More than being merely wrongly decided, Trinity Lutheran has the potential to work an unacknowledged revolution in the Court's Religion Clauses jurisprudence. On the one hand, the holding takes the Free Exercise Clause into broad and uncharted new waters that are well beyond the facts and reasoning of seminal precedent. And on the other, the holding threatens long-standing Establishment Clause practice and precedent with a new legal standard under the Free Exercise Clause with which to challenge prevailing government antiestablishment conduct.In reaching this destabilizing conclusion, the Court commits two primary errors. First, in arriving at its ultimate holding, the Court miscategorizes the case and misapplies Free Exercise precedent. And the judicial whole cloth it invents to distinguish the case is jurisprudentially wanting.4 Second, to get to the Free Exercise Clause issue in the first place, the Court entirely elides an important threshold Establishment Clause analysis.5 Thus Trinity Lutheran is wrongly decided and conceptually infirm, and should be limited and reversed in the future.
Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther ...demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.
This article explores how white US Christians’ home displays, including their decorative presentation of paintings, small sculptures, and other memorabilia of foreign travel, play a critical role in ...representing imperial geographies. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research on the current aid partnership between Lutherans in the US and Madagascar, which stems from American Lutheran mission work in southern Madagascar (1888–2004), the article studies the relationship of contemporary white Minnesotans’ home displays about Madagascar with more historically-established projects of colonial knowledge production. The visual dimensions of materiality have been significant for building traces and imaginaries of far-flung places for home or metropole audiences in Christian colonization. Thus, by placing theories of Christian souvenirs and devotional objects in dialogue with work on Christian colonialism, the author examines home displays as a lesser-considered aspect of the colonial project in the metropole and considers the problems they raise for contemporary efforts to decolonize Christianity.
The eighteen volumes of Detailed Reports on the Salzburger
Emigrants Who Settled in America (reproduced in sixteen
discrete books) contain the diaries and letters of Lutheran pastors
who ministered ...to the Salzburgers, German-speaking Protestant
refugees, in Georgia. Samuel Urlsperger collected and edited these
writings into the Urlsperger Reports printed at Orphanage
Press, Halle, Germany, from 1735 to 1760. The original German
publication, Ausführliche Nachricht von den saltzburgischen
Emigranten, is available through the Internet Archive, but
this English-language translation has not been available online
until now. In the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Urlsperger of the
Lutheran Ministry in Augsburg edited the German edition of the
Detailed Reports after having distributed the many reports
to the faithful in Germany. He made major deletions for both
diplomatic and economic reasons and suppressed proper names. His
son, Johann August Urlsperger, succeeded him. He took even greater
liberties with the text, deleting large sections and rearranging
others. The English version, translated and edited by George
Fenwick Jones, a German scholar, restores the deleted sections and
the proper names and provides the original sequencing of the
material. The Detailed Reports offer insight into daily
life in colonial Georgia and provide precious details and vignettes
on subjects that receive less attention in other sources, notably
African Americans, women, silk production, and the cost of goods in
a frontier colony. The Reports are an underutilized
resource for the study of this period and an unparalleled source
for the evolution of a rural community during the early years of
the colony. The Georgia Open History Library has been
made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings,
conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do
not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
Research has explored Lutheran clergy and politics at various time points, though few studies have focused longitudinally on this significant religious tradition. Using Cooperative Clergy Survey ...data, this research note examines the theological and the political attitudes, beliefs, and activities of pastors in one branch of American Lutheranism, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS), in 2001 and 2009. The results suggest that LCMS clergy became more conservative, both theologically and politically, during this time. Moreover, LCMS clergy indicated higher levels of approval for a variety of political actions in 2009 than in 2001, as well as reporting higher levels of actual political involvement in 2008 than in 2000. A new breed of LCMS clergy may be emerging that is more comfortable engaging with the public square.
Resumo: O presente artigo tem o objetivo de discutir a atuação de segmentos luteranos na construção e no desenvolvimento dos movimentos sociais rurais do Sul do Brasil, particularmente no processo de ...formação do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). Esse esforço visa a demonstrar que os luteranos ajudaram na construção da relação entre prática e reflexão mediante ações culturais, educativas e organizativas no interior dos movimentos sociais rurais. Para traçar tal atuação, foram destacados três religiosos luteranos que tiveram função ativa junto aos camponeses: Gernote Kirinus, Werner Fuchs e Milton Schwantes, que desenvolveram trajetórias individuais dissonantes da ênfase da estrutura religiosa luterana no Brasil.
19th century Protestant revivalist movements have played an important role in Nordic societies at large. In this article, I explore young people's socio-spatial construction of the Awakening ...movement, one of the largest traditional yet vibrant revivalist movements under the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. In doing so, I aim to reveal how youths define their collective religious identity in a time when non-institutional and private emphasis on religion prevails. In addition, vague membership, ritual-centred participation, and the significance of the annual gathering raise topical questions regarding belonging. I build my analysis on Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of social space. The research data consist of interviews with young people (aged 14-18) and the narratives the young people wrote themselves. These data are complemented with my observations from the movement's summer gathering. The findings reveal the agency of the young people as 'inhabitants' (Lefebvre) of tradition-based religious space.
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