Nancy Lukens – författare

Despite Dietrich Bonhoeffer's earlier theological achievements and writings, it was his correspondence and notes from prison that electrified the postwar world six years after his death in 1945. The materials gathered and selected by his friend Eberhard Bethge in Letters and Papers from Prison not only brought Bonhoeffer to a wide and appreciative readership, especially in North America, they also introduced to a broad readership his novel and exciting ideas of religionless Christianity, his open and honest theological appraisal of Christian doctrines, and his sturdy, if sorely tried, faith in face of uncertainty and doubt.

This splendid volume, in many ways the capstone of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, is the first unabridged collection of Bonhoeffer's 19431945 prison letters and theological writings. Here are over 200 documents that include extensive correspondence with his family and Eberhard Bethge (much of it in English for the first time), as well as his theological notes, and his prison poems. The volume offers an illuminating introduction by editor John de Gruchy and an historical Afterword by the editors of the original German volume: Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, and Renate Bethge.

Renate Wind has composed a well-researched and searching biography of Dorothee Soelle (19292003), who became a true religious provocateur and one of the most prolific and widely read theologians of the postwar period.

Born in Germany and educated at the University of Cologne, Soelle turned from literary studies to theology, concentrating on rethinking Christian convictions in light of World War II and the Holocaust. A poet and activist as well as theologian, after her arrival at Union Theological Seminary in 1974, where she assumed the post previously held by Paul Tillich, Soelle became a leading voice for the liberation of women and against militarism, especially the Vietnam War. Her person, work, travels, and the times themselves combined to make her a pioneer and leader in the most exciting developments of the period: political theology, feminist theology, and liberation theology. Among her influential works were Christ the Representative (1967), Suffering (1975), To Work and to Love (1984), Theology for Skeptics (1994), and The Silent Cry (2001).

Winds short and insightful biography is informed by extensive interviews with Soelles friends and family, especially her husband, Fulbert Steffensky, by use of the familys archives, and by Winds extensive knowledge of contemporary theology, political history, and the contemporary church.