Lutherans Today: American Lutheran Identity in the Twenty-First Century

In the middle of the twentieth century, American Lutherans were newsworthy enough to find themselves on the cover of Time magazine. Their claim to fame? In an era when American churches were beginning to look and act alike, Lutherans' strong confessional nature and stress on theology as well as their liturgy and ethnicity set them apart. They were "Protestants with a difference" at a time when differences were supposed to be dissolving in the American melting pot.

Subsequent years have posed...