Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian whose work joined Christian ethics to communal practice. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community grew from the fellowship of the underground seminary he led at Finkenwalde in the 1930s. Its short chapters consider shared worship, private devotion, service, confession, and the discipline of listening to others. The established English text, translated by John W. Doberstein and first issued by Harper in 1954, became one of Bonhoeffer’s best-known books. He resisted Germany’s dictatorship and was killed at Flossenbürg in April 1945, shortly before the European conflict ended. That biography gives the book’s insistence on accountable community a concrete historical setting.