Matthew recounts the story of a young, hoity-toity soft-nationalist German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who discovered the radical soul of antifascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930. He came to the US believing in the white Jesus of European empire, but left enthralled by the Black Jesus of the oppressed. Back in Germany, he played 78s of spirituals and gospel tunes for the students of his illegal seminaries as he and other members of the Confessing Church issued some of the earliest formal rebukes to the Reich. And then he joined a plot to assassinate Hitler.
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Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Translated by Eric Mosbacher, Peter and Betty Ross, Frank Clarke, and William Glen-Doepel. Revised and edited by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. Translated by R. H. Fuller, revised by Irmgard Booth. New York: Touchstone, 2018.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. Translated by Reginald Fuller, Frank Clark, and John Bowden. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Bonhoeffer Reader. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.
Marsh, Charles. Strange Glory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Martin, Eric. The Writing on the Wall: Signs of Faith Against Fascism. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022.
McNeil, Genna Rae, Houston Bryan Roberson, Quinton Hosford Dixie, and Kevin McGruder. Witness: Two Hundred Years of African-American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014.
Tietz, Christiane. Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Translated by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.
Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. With a preface by T. S. Eliot. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2014.
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