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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, is a Christian hero for many. Executed by the Nazis just days before the end of WWII for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer is hailed as a 20th-century martyr. But Bonhoeffer struggled with a moral dilemma – his religious views were in stark contrast to the evil he saw all around him. He chose to face possible imprisonment and execution and to remain faithful to the principles of his belief in God. Across the political and theological spectrum, Bonhoeffer is celebrated as an icon of true Christianity and his theological writings...

Paula Bonhoeffer saw the risks of educating her small, impressionable children in the state’s schools. ... Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), the German theologian who was hanged in April 1945 by the Nazis for spying on and opposing Hitler’s regime. .... Eric Metaxas’ biography of the Christian martyr—Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Spy—... time to learn more about the man who defied Hitler and paid with his life. ... Metaxas’ work offers a penetrating look into Bonhoeffer’s life, mind, faith, and family. Bonhoeffer was not the only remarkable person in his family. Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer—Bonhoeffer’s parents—brought eight children into the world in the...

YouTube removed an entire radio show from its platform this week, hosted by popular Christian author and social commentator Eric Metaxas, citing violations of their community standards. Metaxas – author of biographies on the lives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, and William Wilberforce, among many other books – announced the news to his social media pages on Tuesday. “It’s happened,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “Despite our going FAR out of our way to comply with their arbitrary ‘community standards’, YouTube decided to remove every single video we’ve ever done on the Eric Metaxas Show off their platform.” The...

OH MY WORD!!!! Fellow Freepers you MUST listen to this!!!! God was NOT mocked yesterday!!!! He was alive and well and used His servant, Eric Metaxas, yesterday to speak straight to the President. It starts at about 35min, BUT the GREAT moment takes place at the 45min mark. BEFORE the Preisdent speaks, God through Metaxas, says that people, even Satan use the scripture to do the OPPOSITE of what God does. I was BLOWN away!!!! Eric did not know that Obama would misuse the scripture in just a few short minutes but GOD DID!!!! THEN the most amazing thing happens...

Nazi monster Dr. Josef Mengele is known to have ordered the murder of over 400,000 Jews at Auschwitz from 1943 to 1945. Thousands more he kept alive and mercilessly tortured to death during experiments intended to create an Aryan super-race. Much of Mengele’s “medical research” was conducted on children and newborns – especially twins. One witness described what happened after Mengele once delivered a Jewish “fetus”: “But when he saw that there was only one baby and not twins, he tore the baby right out of the mother’s uterus, threw it into an oven and walked away,” she said. “We...

Pat Robertson made headlines this week when he offered his opinion that the United States should assassinate Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. What surprised me the most is that so many FReepers took offense to this statement. While nearly all of us fully support the war against Islamofascist terrorism, many here were outraged that a religious personality would call for the death of a totalitarian dictator. From the outset, let me say that I often disagree with Robertson. I live in Virginia Beach and have been listening to his outrageous statements for a long time. I remember ten years ago when...

Barring the unlikely possibility of a stay, a Presbyterian minister who gunned down an abortion doctor will next week become the first American executed for anti-abortion violence. To a loyal core of admirers, Paul Hill is a martyr-to-be whose actions were justified by the Bible. To others, on both sides of the abortion debate, he is a zealot undeserving of respect or pity. "In a very significant way, it's a sad day," said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "It's sad that people like Paul Hill would murder in the name of life." Hill, a 49-year-old...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless — reasons fall on dead ears. Bonhoeffer's famous text, which we slightly edited for this video, serves any free society as a warning of what can happen when certain people gain too much power.CHAPTERS0:00 The Darkest Chapter0:55 Letters from prison4:29 About Bonhoeffer5:19 Our Patrons5:28 Subscribe and supportScript based on the work of Dietrich BonhoefferEditor: Jonas KoblinArtist: Pascal GaggelliVoice: Matt AbbottColoring: NalinEditing: Peera LertsukittipongsaProduction: Selina BadorProduction Assistant: BiankaProofreading: SusanBonhoeffer's Theory of...

How a onetime aspiring public intellectual and Trump doubter turned into a true believer in stolen elections. For Eric Metaxas, a prominent evangelical public intellectual and Christian radio host, knowing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is like believing in Jesus. He just knows in his heart that it is true. During a prayer call with evangelical supporters of President Donald Trump on Tuesday night (Dec. 2), Metaxas said that God is on Trump’s side in the fight against a “stolen” election. “It’s like somebody saying, ‘Oh, you don’t have enough evidence to believe in Jesus.’ We have enough...

The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is also the most passionate, the wildest, and one might almost say the most revolutionary Advent hymn that has ever been sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary as we often see her portrayed in paintings. This Mary...is passionate, carried away, proud, enthusiastic. There is none of the sweet, wistful, or even playful tone of many of our Christmas carols, but instead a hard, strong, relentless hymn about the toppling of the thrones and the humiliation of the lords of this world, about the power of God and...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: Whoever lives beneath the cross of Jesus, and has discerned in the cross of Jesus the utter ungodliness of all people and of their own hearts, will find there is no sin that can ever be unfamiliar. Whoever has once been appalled by the horror of their own sin, which nailed Jesus to the cross, will no longer be appalled by even the most serious sin of another Christian; rather they know the human heart from the cross of Jesus. Such persons know how totally lost is the human heart in sin and weakness, how it...

A new biography is raising questions about the life and relationships of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi dissident whose theological writings remain widely influential among Christians. Both left-leaning and right-leaning Christians herald the life and writings of Bonhoeffer, who was hanged for his involvement in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Bonhoeffer was engaged to a woman at the time of his execution, observing that he had lived a full life even though he would die a virgin. The new biography, “Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” from University of Virginia religious studies professor Charles Marsh, implies...

video starts to get to business at the 8 min mark. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is well known for his heroic opposition to the Nazis. Dr. Hauerwas' lecture examines Bonhoeffer's understanding of lying and why it's approporiate to hold politics to a higher standard of truthful speech. This relationship between truth and politics is a particular challenge for democratic regimes. From the University of California, Berkeley series, "Burke Lectureship on Religion & Society"

For the past several years toward the end of the Lenten season, I have been reminded of the sad yet heroic life and times of the brave German theologian and scholar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although rarely discussed in popular culture, it was on April 8, 1945, that Bonhoeffer, the young, patriot pastor, led his last worship service one week after Easter at a church associated with the Flossenburg concentration camp in the isolated Bavaria town near the Czechoslovakian border. So who exactly was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and what did he do nearly 70 years ago that he continues to be remembered as...

Today is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday. Since my book on him was published three years ago, fascination with the young German pastor continues to grow. The interest is so great I’ve recently been asked to do a ten-city Bonhoeffer tour. I have to ask myself: Why are so many people intrigued by Bonhoeffer? The answer, I believe, is that the message of Bonhoeffer's life is hugely relevant today—especially when it comes to the growing threats against religious freedom. Thoughtful people see the handwriting on the wall: First there's the HHS mandate, which demands that religious organizations buy insurance that covers abortion-inducing...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

On MSNBC’s Jansing and Co. author Eric Metaxas compared the Obama's administration's encroachment on religious freedoms to Nazi Germany. “I met the president. I gave him a copy of my book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which he said he’s going to read,” Metaxas said during the interview. “In that book, you read about what happened to an amazingly great country called Germany…” “In the beginning, it always starts really, really small. We need to understand as Americans — if we do not see this as a bright line in the sand — if you’re not a Catholic, if you use contraception...

Speakers at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in the nation’s capital usually keep their talks diplomatic. After all, the room is filled with ambassadors, lawmakers from both parties, Cabinet members, and people of various faiths from around the world. But Eric Metaxas, the featured speaker Thursday morning and the author of biographies on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce, talked to an audience of 4,000 important people about false religion, human depravity, poverty, slavery, and abortion. But the New York author delivered his sharp commentary with his trademark wit, which kept the audience roaring with laughter. The halls of the Washington...

The American Revolution was almost contemporaneous with the French one, and politically the two were not unconnected; yet they were profoundly different in character. The American democracy is not founded upon the emancipated man bit. quite the contrary, upon the kingdom of God and the limitation of earthly powers by the sovereignty of God. It is indeed significant when, in contrast to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, American historians can say that the federal constitution was written by men who were conscious of original sin and of the wickedness of the human heart. Earthly wielders of power, and...

In getting ready for tonight, Charles Gray asked me to keep two things in mind.  First, he asked me to remember that we have a mixed audience here in Houston Hall, both Catholic and non-Catholic.  Second, he asked me to explain what Catholics mean when we talk about the “sanctity” of human life, and why the Church deals with issues like abortion so vigorously in the public square.  As it turns out, most of my sources tonight are not Catholic.  That shouldn’t be surprising.  Catholics have no monopoly on respect for human dignity.  Catholics do have a very long tradition...