# Uwe Siemon-Netto

Uwe Siemon-Netto (born October 25, 1936), the former religion editor of United Press International, is a German international columnist and a Lutheran lay theologian. He is a Senior Distinguished Fellow of 1517 The Legacy Project, a non-profit initiative built, in part, upon the work of Martin Luther, John Warwick Montgomery, and Rod Rosenbladt. This initiative absorbed the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life (CLTPL) and League of Faithful Masks (LFM), a non-profit religious corporation based in Capistrano Beach, California. Siemon-Netto founded CLTPL-LFM and is its director emeritus. CLTPL/LFM champions the Lutheran doctrine of vocation as "an antidote against the destructive force of contemporary narcissism". This doctrine holds that Christians have a divine calling to serve their neighbor in all their secular endeavors. CLTPL was formerly located at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, where Siemon-Netto served as scholar-in-residence until 2009. As a journalist, Siemon-Netto specializes in issues relating to faith and society, and in foreign affairs. He is a correspondent of freepressers.com, an internet publication, and was a contributor of The Atlantic Times, an English-language monthly newspaper produced by leading German journalists for the North American market. He also taught as a visiting professor of journalism at Concordia University Irvine and led doctoral-level seminars at Concordia Seminary and other venues in the United States, Germany, and France. For nearly 60 years, Siemon-Netto was married to Gillian née Ackers, an Englishwoman, who died on March 6, 2022, in Mission Viejo, California. On April 15, 2023 he married Karin von Renthe-Fink, a fellow German he met church after his first wife's death.

## Early life

Siemon-Netto was born in Leipzig, Germany, where his devoutly Lutheran grandmother was the pivotal figure in his childhood in World War II.

## Journalism career

Siemon-Netto began his journalism career 1956 as a trainee at Westfalenpost, a large regional newspaper in southern Westphalia. In 1958, he joined the Associated Press in Frankfurt first as copy editor, then as slot editor and roving reporter, covering, among other things, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. From 1962 to 1969, he worked as a correspondent for Springer Foreign News Service in London, Paris, New York, Vietnam, the Middle East and Hong Kong. His assignments included the United Nations, the U.S. civil rights movement, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War (over a period of five years), the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, and China's Cultural Revolution. From 1969 to 1973, Siemon-Netto was North American correspondent for the magazine, Der Stern, writing about many major news events in North, Central, and South America, and in East Asia, France, and again Vietnam.
From 1973 to 1986, Siemon-Netto served as Managing Editor for Hamburger Morgenpost, taught journalism at Hamburg's Journalistenschule Henri Nannen, worked as a freelance correspondent for German, Swiss, French, and U.S. publications, and as a media consultant overseeing a variety of design and management tasks at publications in Germany and the United States.
In mid-career, at age 50, he began his theological studies, first in Chicago, then in Boston. During these studies, Siemon-Netto freelanced as a magazine correspondent. At the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany's subsequent reunification, he served, concurrently with his academic work, as an editorial consultant and—as independent contractor—executive editor for Bild, launching its East German editions, helping plan newspapers for Leipzig and Dresden, training Eastern German journalists, and developing a new curriculum for Journalistenschule Axel Springer.
From 1993 to 1994 he managed the redesign of the Berlin daily paper Der Tagesspiegel, the Scientific American in New York, and ideaSpektrum, a Protestant magazine in Wetzlar, Germany. He also co-founded CA – Confessio Augustana, a Lutheran quarterly magazine in Neuendettelsau, Bavaria. From 2000 to 2005, he was religious affairs editor of United Press International and a Washington-based columnist for a variety of German-language publications.

## Education

He attended a variety of schools in Germany. He earned his M.A. in theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. His Ph.D. in theology and sociology of religion is from Boston University under Peter L. Berger, Carter Lindberg, and Uri Ra'Anan. He spent a post-doctoral year at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey,. working on a project to bridge the gap between theology and the media.

## Honors and awards

* D.Litt., Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo. (2004)
* Friedrich Hecker Freedom Award (2009)