The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This course is an exploration of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and an examination of his select writings. The course investigates the wider socio-political and theological contexts of Germany’s Weimar Republic, the ascendency of Hitler and Nazism, the Confessing Church, and the covert resistance to Hitler that Bonhoeffer later joined. The course also asks how these realities, together with Bonhoeffer’s writings, inform our 21st-Century North American context of Christian existence. Lectures, discussions. Seminar presentation, multiple choice exam, research paper.