Letters and Papers from Prison

In our "Books Change" series, historians of religion consider books that have changed us or have themselves been changed.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison comes under the category of “Books to Be Read on an Annual Basis”—like Augustine’s Confessions, King Lear, or anything by Flannery O’Connor. In general, we read too many books and return to too few. The critic John Ciardi coined the phrases “horizontal audience” and “vertical audience” to describe the reach of a novelist or a poet. It’s a big mistake to return again and again to a book that doesn’t probe the heart or expand the reader’s vision.

I first read Letters and Papers from Prison as a seminary student many years ago. It was an assigned book. We read it for a couple of inadequate reasons. The first was its usefulness as a historical precursor to the “secular religion” fad of the 1960s. The second was to help us master a theological entity called “Bonhoeffer,” whom we could then file in the “B” section of our theological libraries among Barth, Brunner, Buber, and Bultmann. I don't remember feeling a close kinship with the author or being particularly moved or shaped by his story.