Posts Tagged “Dietrich Bonhoeffer”
I’ve been dipping in an out of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison and was surprised to discover that he used the sign of the cross in his daily prayers. In a letter from November 21, 1943, he says this: “I’ve found that following [Martin] Luther’s instruction to ‘make the sign of the cross’ [...]
I discovered later, and I’m still discovering it right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes, and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely [...]
I wonder how often we find our prayers dead and lifeless. I wonder how often we come up dry and dumb with no words, no thoughts, no way of formulating the feelings, frustrations, and various shades of grief that we bear. Burdened and distracted, we can hardly remember to pray, and when we do we [...]
The American patriot leader Joseph Warren was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. Coming upon his bloodied and fallen body, a British soldier plucked a copy of the 1559 Geneva Psalter from his pocket. Warren had carried the little book into battle, a volume whose pages declare that God “maketh wars [...]