About this item
In the decades since his execution by the Nazis in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, theologian, and anti-Hitler conspirator, has become one of the most widely read and inspiring Christian thinkers of our time. Now, drawing on extensive new research, Strange Glory offers a definitive account, by turns majestic and intimate, of this modern icon. The scion of a grand family that rarely went to church, Dietrich decided as a thirteen-year-old to become a theologian. By twenty-one, the rather snobbish and awkward young man had already written a dissertation hailed by Karl Barth as a "theological miracle." But it was only the first step in a lifelong effort to recover an authentic and orthodox Christianity from the dilutions of liberal Protestantism and the modern idolatries of blood and nation - which forces had left the German church completely helpless against the onslaught of Nazism.
About the Author
Charles Marsh is the Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology (livedtheology.org) . He was born in Mobile, Alabama and educated at Harvard University Divinity School and the University of Virginia. Support for his recent "Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer" (Knopf, 2014) came from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, where he served as the Ellen Marie Gorrissen Fellow. His books include the memoir "The Last Days" (Basic Books, 2000) , and "God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights" (Princeton 1997) , which won the 1998 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
