Bonhoeffer and King

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. are here reassessed for a new context and a new generation. Both combined activism, ministry, and theology. Both took on public roles in opposition to prevailing powers of their time. Both professed a kind of Christian realism and ended as martyrs to their respective causes. Here many of the leaders in Christian social thought revisit the insights, causes, and strategies that Bonhoeffer and King employed for a new generation and its concerns: race, reconciliation, nonviolence, political violence, Christian theological identity, and ministry.

Willis Jenkins is Margaret Farley Assistant Professor of Social Ethics at Yale Divinity School and author of Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (2008). Jennifer M. McBride is a Visiting Lecturer at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and Director of the Atlanta Theological Associations Certificate in Theological Studies at Metro State Prison for Women. She is author of the forthcoming work The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness.