1. Studies include Robert H. Nelson, Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy: A Different Protestant Ethic (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017); Jørn Henrik Petersen, “Martin Luther and the Danish Welfare State,” Lutheran Quarterly 32 (2018): 1–27. Both, however, refrain from drawing the line connecting the Reformation and the modern welfare state.
2. See, e.g., Carl Springer, Cicero in Heaven: The Roman Rhetor and Luther's Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 80-89
3. Gary M. Simpson, "Philosophical and Political Influence, Stoic/Academic/Ciceronian," in Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation, ed. Mark A. Lamport (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 2:602-604.
4. I use the concept of social imaginary in the same way Charles Taylor does in his A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 171. Taylor defines “social imaginary” as “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” See also Bo Kristian Holm and Nina Javette Koefoed, “Studying the Impact of Lutheranism on Societal Development: An Introduction,” in Lutheran Theology and the Shaping of Society: The Danish Monarchy as Example, ed. Bo Kristian Holm and Nina Javette Koefoes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 9–24.
5. John Witte, Jr. Law and Protestantism. The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).