Bibliography Author: Lisa Dahill

Explores Bonhoeffer’s views on gender — a shadow side of his thinking — both as his theology shifts under Hitler and in glimpses of potential breakthroughs in the conspiracy/prison period. Its use of literary genre analysis provides a lens for retrieving a more life-giving Bonhoefferian view of gender.

Traces the context, content, and key insights of Life Together for 21st century readers, noting connections to neo-monasticism, to discussions of “real vs. virtual” community, and to the ecological context of our contemporary life together.

Explores Bonhoeffer’s theology of human embodiment, developing five primary insights on the Christian significance of the body and refracting the discussion through the experience glimpsed in the 2009 film “Precious.”

Both gender and spirituality are incredibly complex realities, difficult to define yet reaching to the core of human and Christian life. This essay articulates multiple layers and aspects of the meaning of gender within the overarching framework of the Christian experience of God. A concluding section sketches implications of such exploration for the study of spirituality.

An abstract of the central themes of the book above with the same title, originally published in xSpiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality (Fall 2001).

Marcia Falk is a Jewish poet, scholar, and translator with a deep love for liturgical texts – particularly the berakhot or blessings at the heart of Jewish prayer – and a passion for their continuing life in Jewish contexts far removed from the ancient communities that originated these forms. This article provides an introduction to Falk‘s work and to broader questions of feminist recasting of traditional liturgical forms.

In this article, I explore what it might mean to name Bonhoeffer‘s experience of the Christian life a “Christmas” spirituality. Both pieces were developed out of lectures given in fall 2006. This first piece explores Bonhoeffer‘s conception of the self and its particularity and formation, with reference to discernment, and was originally presented to a symposium of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning in Boston; the Christmas motif frames the piece for this ecumenical audience but is not fully developed.

This essay contributes to an invited panel reflecting on the future of the discipline of Christian Spirituality; I assert the necessity of an ecological perspective framing everything we do.

This essay makes available a central portion of Reading from the Underside of Selfhood: its tracing of Bonhoeffer‘s conception of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ through a feminist lens.

Explores the affective, even erotic, heart of Paul Gerhardt‘s (and, more broadly, Lutheran) spirituality through the text of one of his hymns: “Warum sollt ich mich denn grämen.” Locating the hymn within the traditions of mystical love poetry and communally embodied song, the article asserts that recovery of such hymns can provide an authentically Lutheran contribution, full of theological and poetic richness, to the repertoire of heart-focused worship songs so popular today.