Uwe Siemon-Netto (born October 25, 1936), the former religion editor of United Press International, is a German international columnist and a Lutheran lay (non-ordained) 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. 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