Books by Bonheoffer
No Rusty Swords /
The Cost of Discipleship
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Letters and Papers from Prison /
Sanctorum Communio
A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings
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Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible /
Ethics
No Difference in the Fare: Dietrich
Bonheoffer and the Problem of Racism
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Dietrich Bonheoffer was a theologian, a
pastor, a spiritual writer, a musician, and an author of fiction
and poetry. The integrity of his Christian faith and life, and
the international appeal of his writings, have received
broad recognition and admiration, all of which has led to
a consensus that he is one of the theologians of his time whose
theological reflections might lead future generations of
Christians into creating a new more spiritual and responsible
millennium. Bio &
Chronology
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"It's a queer feeling to be so utterly dependent on the
help of others, but at least it teaches one to be grateful, a
lesson I hope I shall never forget. In normal life we hardly
realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot
be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate
the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe
to the help of others."
Letters and Papers from Prison
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* * The most influential contribution made by the
Negro to American Christianity lies in the "Negro
Spirituals," in which the distress and delivery of the
people of Israel ("Go down, Moses . . ."), the misery
and consolation of the human heart ("Nobody knows the
trouble I've seen"), and the love of the Redeemer and
longing for the kingdom of heaven ("Swing low, sweet
chariot . . .") find moving expression. Every white
American knows, sings and loves these songs. It is barely
understandable that great Negro singers can sing these songs
before packed concert audiences of whites, to tumultuous
applause, while at the same time these same men and women are
still denied access to the white community through social
discrimination.
The Negro Church
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"At Abyssinian,
Bonhoeffer sat under the ministry of Powell almost weekly for
over six months. Powell's culturally engaged sermons blended the
artful rhetoric and congregational, noncreedal style of the
black Baptist church with the best of American social
pragmatism. Powell had learned to appreciate John Dewey through
their work together at the NAACP. We have recently learned
through the research of Ralph Garlin Clingan that some of
Bonhoeffer's theological vocabulary was borrowed from the pulpit
work Pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. For example, Powell
complained that the problem of the Euro-American church was
'cheap grace'." Ralph Garlin
Clingan, "Against Cheap Grace in a World Come of Age: A
Study in the Hermeneutics of Adam Clayton Powell, 1865-1953, in
His Intellectual Context." A Drew University Ph.D.
dissertation (UMI Microfilm 9732791, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1997).
First We
Take Manhattan
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Barth was the first theologian
to begin the criticism of religion,-and that remains his really
great merit-but he set in its place the positivist doctrine of
revelation which says in effect, "Take it or leave
it": Virgin Birth, Trinity or anything else, every-thing
which is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole,
which latter has to be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That
is not in accordance with the Bible. There are degrees of
perception and degrees of significance, i.e. a secret discipline
must be re-established whereby the mysteries of the
Christian faith are preserved from profanation. The positivist
doctrine of revelation makes it too easy for itself, setting up,
as in the ultimate analysis it does, a law of faith, and
mutilating what is, by the incarnation of Christ, a gift for us.
The place of religion is taken by the Church-that is, in itself,
as the Bible teaches it should be-but the world is made to
depend upon itself and left to its own devices, and that is all
wrong.
May 5th 1944
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Even though there has been
surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the
so-called ultimate questions—death, guilt—on which only
"God" can furnish an answer, and which are the reason
why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to
some extent, by these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if
one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered
without "God"? We have of course the secularized
off-shoots of Christian theology, the existentialist philosophers
and the psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented,
happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate, and merely
unwilling to realize that it is in severe straits it knows nothing
at all about, from which only they can rescue it. June
8th letter
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Forged: Writing in the Name of God
Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
By Bart D. Ehrman
The evocative title tells it all and hints at the tone of sensationalism that pervades this book. Those familiar with the earlier work of Ehrman, a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of more than 20 books including Misquoting Jesus, will not be surprised at the content of this one. Written in a manner accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman argues that many books of the New Testament are not simply written by people other than the ones to whom they are attributed, but that they are deliberate forgeries. The word itself connotes scandal and crime, and it appears on nearly every page. Indeed, this book takes on an idea widely accepted by biblical scholars: that writing in someone else's name was common practice and perfectly okay in ancient times. Ehrman argues that it was not even then considered acceptable—hence, a forgery. While many readers may wish for more evidence of the charge, Ehrman's introduction to the arguments and debates among different religious communities during the first few centuries and among the early Christians themselves, though not the book's main point, is especially valuable.—Publishers Weekly /
Forged Bart Ehrman’s New Salvo (Witherington)
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update 23 June 2008
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