Strange Glory

Drawing on extensive new research, a majestic and definitive biography of a modern icon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: the German pastor-theologian and anti-Hitler conspirator who, in the decades since his execution by the Nazis in 1945, has become the most widely read and influential Protestant thinker of our time.

With unprecedented archival access, Charles Marsh offers an intimate, and often startling, fresh portrait of the revered Christian martyr. We see him as a young man: the scion of a wealthy family who rarely went to church but who, at the age of twenty-five, wrote a dissertation that was proclaimed a "theological miracle." We see him in 1930 when he spent ten fateful months in America: a season of dramatic encounters with social reformers, Harlem churchmen, and Establishment intellectuals, which gave the young German an utterly new perspective on faith and moral responsibility. We see him return to Germany, to a ministry for the downtrodden; we witness his vocal denunciation of Germany's treatment of the Jews, and his anti-Nazi activism. And we see him drawn into the officers' plot to kill Hitler, for his part in which he would be hanged. Bringing to life for the first time this complex human being-his substantial flaws, inner torment, the friendships and the faith that sustained and finally redeemed him-Strange Glory is a momentous achievement.