Category: Theology

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.

Originally presented as a response to a lecture given by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 2006, this essay contributes in its own right to the conversation on Lutheran spirituality nourished by the last three decades of Finnish Luther scholarship around questions of theosis. It explores these motifs with a particular focus on desire, eros, and intimacy as neglected dimensions of an authentically Lutheran spirituality.

This essay takes further the ―Christmas‖ motif as a metaphor of Bonhoeffer‘s Lutheran spirituality. Condensed from lectures given at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, CA, and Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, Ontario, it focuses on the last five years of Bonhoeffer‘s life and the intensifying of the incarnational heart of his experience of Jesus Christ in the face of not only profound suffering and evil, but the radiance of love.

This article explores ten strategies – some counter-intuitive – by which I see Bonhoeffer engaged in resisting various dimensions of the Nazi worldview and complicity with evil. It includes implications for our own resistance and context.

Discernment refers to the complex practice of learning, as an individual or community, to attend to the voice and leading of the Spirit in one‘s own life and context. This practice was central to Bonhoeffer‘s spirituality as he sought to remain attentive to God‘s presence and guidance in the unprecedented and morally chaotic world of Nazi Germany. This essay traces central elements of Bonhoeffer‘s experience of discernment as an initial contribution to a broader Lutheran understanding of this practice.

Provides a Lutheran definition of spirituality and introduces readers to the academic study of Christian spirituality.

This article first explores and exposes the interpenetration of the ethos, institutions, and culture of militarism in the United States‘ culture at large. Second, the article investigates the rhetoric and practices of sacrifice that run like a current between war-culture and popular understandings of Christianity in the United States. Frameworks of sacrifice animate war-culture and simultaneously mask its operations with a sacred canopy.