Item Type: Journal Articles

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.

A brief synopsis of Soelle‘s book, On Suffering.

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.

What would we say about the losses associated with war if we did not describe them as sacrifices? How is this experience influenced by narratives of Jesus‘ cosmic sacrificial self-giving? This article explores the electrical exchange of sacrificial frameworks in U.S. war-culture and popular Christian understandings and practices to ask: Is there a way to rehabilitate understandings of sacrifice in Christianity without aiding and abetting war?