This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

Charles March is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia

and director there of the project on lived theology.

He's been the recipient of several fellowships and academic prizes, including the fact that he won

a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.

He's the author of several books including God's long summer stories of

faith and civil rights which won the 1998 Grandmyer Award in Religion. His

most recent work is Strange Glory, a life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Charles Marsh, welcome to thinking in public.

Charles Marsh in terms of your new biography and as I said to our listeners I believe it's one of the most

important biographies on any

subject in in recent years how did you come to make such a life project out of

Dietrich Bonhoeffer oh thank you all and and what kind words you speak, for which I'm grateful.

I had 25 years ago, this spring, submitted a lumbering doctoral dissertation at the University of

of Virginia on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's early philosophical theology. Bonhoeffer

had come to me in my theory saturated doctoral work as a breath of fresh air,

as a way back to life, to the ministries of the church, to the delights of the church to the lights of the world and service in the world. I had not, beyond that,

that a lot of time in Bonhoeper scholarship. I had made my way into a number of books

on the civil rights movement and worked in what I like to call this enterprise of lived theology.

But I've always felt like Bonhefer's witness was very present in whatever I did and whatever academic venture or involvement in the

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