This article is about Martin Luther's economic ethics. Background information is given about the economic situation 500 years ago. The high levels of poverty in Germany were the main reason behind ...the health crisis experienced at that time. Luther reprimanded the heads of families to work diligently and honestly in order to ensure a stable income for the family. He prophetically also criticised the dishonesty on the market place. He exposed the many attempts by people to exploit the poor. An overview is given of the development of his economic thought. The focus falls, however, on his essay Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher (1524) On trade and profiteering.
The article takes as its point of departure the notion that the Scandinavian countries have been dominated by a monocultural Lutheranism. This notion is nuanced by focusing on everyday life and ...oppositional voices. In the nineteenth century, the Lutheran state churches began to interpret their past as religious cultural heritage. Focusing especially on Norway, it is argued that this monocultural perspective has been replaced by a multicultural one with emphasis on ethnic minorities and indigenous religious heritage, dialogue and tolerance.
Ingria, a region that came to the Swedish Empire in the seventeenth century, showcases an interesting instance of religious contact between Swedish state Lutheranism, Russian Orthodoxy, and the ...grassroot Lutheranism of the local German merchants. The contact affected all three religious communities over the course of the century, especially Swedish attempts to integrate the population in the Swedish state church. These attempts initially failed, until Heinrich Stahl became superintendent and decided to conduct missionary work in Russian and combine it with education, a programme his successor Johannes Gezelius continued. While promising, these efforts were continuously impeded by Russian policies and wars.
Abstract
This article empirically explores the interplay between the secular, post-Lutheran majority culture and Muslim immigrants in Sweden. It presents the ambiguous role of religion in the ...country's mainstream discourse, the othering of religion that is characteristic to this, and the expectations of Muslims to be strongly religious that follows as its consequence. Four results of a web-panel survey with Swedes of Muslim and Christian family background are then presented: (1) Both groups largely distance themselves from their own religious heritage - the Muslims do this in a more definite way; (2) the Muslim respondents have more secular values and identities than the Christians; (3) contrary expectations, Christian respondents show more affinity to their religious heritage than the Muslims do to theirs; and (4) the fusion between the groups is prominent. The article concludes that equating religious family heritage with religious identity is precipitous in the case of Swedish Muslims.
At the conclusion of his
, a treatise on the law of nature, how it is grasped by the human mind, and how it coheres with the Decalogue, Niels Hemmingsen claims to have eschewed the use of theological ...sources in his argument, claiming instead to have demonstrated ‘how far reason is able to progress without the prophetic and apostolic word’. Yet the reader of the treatise will notice several citations of theologians alongside those of pagan poets and philosophers. This essay demonstrates that there is less here than meets the eye, that is, that Hemmingsen quotes theologians only to buttress what one can know from natural reason or the classical tradition, even when he is discussing God, and thus he does not violate his own stated principle.
The topic of this article is religious materiality in a Finnish, Lutheran setting. Reflecting on the altar cross of the Luther Church Helsinki – and more specifically the elevated role the cross ...played in the re-opening of the church in 2016 – the article supports the argument of recent scholars that Protestant engagement with materiality is not unambiguously negative but rather ambivalent. Using James Bielo’s concept of “legitimizing frames” – i.e. boundaries or landmarks within which Protestants feel safe enough to deal with things and objects – the article suggests a so-called heritagization frame. Objects or things used within such a frame induce in people a sense of past events and experiences – preferably events in which God has made himself known in this world. This, in turn, enables people’s engagement with the objects.
The region of Latgale/Polish Livonia lies on the intersection between the Lutheran northern half of the Baltic region and the Roman Catholic southern part. Almost all of the local German nobility had ...accepted Lutheranism, but the region was politically a part of the Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Jesuit missionaries tried to re-Catholicise this region. The religious contact between the Catholic missionaries and the surrounding Lutheran and pagan countryside was diligently noted in the Jesuit reports, which became less polemical during the time period as the region’s inhabitants turned to the Catholic Church. While the missionaries were solitary fighters for Catholicism in 1625, they had become ordinary representatives of the local elite by 1772, when the region was ceded to the Russian Empire.
The article considers V. I. Dal as a religiously minded writer. For the first time, it analyzes biographical factors that contributed to the writer’s transition from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, such as ...upbringing in the family, independent analysis of dogmas, and most importantly, love for the Russian people, their “childish” faith and the extraordinary richness of the language. Dal’s Orthodoxy manifested the Western rational basis inherited from the family: judging by the autobiographical touches in his legacy, he was distinguished not so much by deep contemplation, a penchant for long prayer, love for the beauty of church singing or the splendor of the temple, so characteristic of the Byzantine version of Christianity, but by tireless practical activity and a strong sense of duty and responsibility. A deep awareness of folk Orthodoxy was reflected in many of his works. A significant body of them can be called “spiritual prose.” It differs both thematically and stylistically from the usual Dal’s stories (“Petersburg janitor,” “Orderly,” “Sausage makers and bearded men,” etc.), from Dal’s stylization in his fairy tales, and tells about miracles, about manifestations of God’s Providence in human life, about Christian virtues and spiritual temptations of the wavering human soul.
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