Bonhoeffer Biographed and Reviewed

Here is a total King's fest on the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

"Belief in Action: In Hitler's Germany, a Lutheran pastor chooses resistance and pays with his life." It is prof. Joseph Loconte's review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2010) by Eric Metaxas.

Joe Loconte has been a senior lecturer at The King's College for the last couple of years and will be an assistant professor next year. He teaches Western Civ and American Foreign Policy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer himself is tied closely into King's. Our student body is divided into sub-communities called "houses," and one of the men's houses is the House of Bonhoeffer.

Eric Metaxas, the book's author, is a good friend of the college and has taught courses here in persuasive writing.

The review even includes a Bonhoeffer link to New York City: After a 1939 visit to New York's Riverside Church, a citadel of social-gospel liberalism, he wrote that he was stunned by the "self-indulgent" and "idolatrous religion" that he saw there. "I have no doubt at all that one day the storm will blow with full force on this religious hand-out," he wrote, "if God himself is still anywhere on the scene."

Joseph Loconte is the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).