The Church & the World Wars
What happens to the church when the state goes to war — and when it goes wrong. These books cover the religious fervour of 1914, the German church's collapse and the small resistance inside it, and the people who paid for saying no.
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The Great and Holy War
1914 was preached as a holy war on every side. Jenkins recovers the religious frenzy of the First World War and what it left behind. Buy on Bookshop →

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
The bestselling life, and the reason most readers know Bonhoeffer at all. Vivid and moving — read alongside Marsh, below, which historians consider the more reliable portrait. Buy on Bookshop →

Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The scholarly standard. Marsh gives you a more complicated and more human Bonhoeffer than the martyr of popular memory. Buy on Bookshop →

The Cost of Discipleship
Written as the German church was capitulating, and sharpened by it. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Buy on Bookshop →

Letters and Papers from Prison
The Tegel letters — theology worked out in a cell, unfinished, and all the more searching for it. Buy on Bookshop →

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow
Sermons actually preached in the Third Reich, with the context that makes them legible. The nerve required is on every page. Buy on Bookshop →

The Hiding Place
A Dutch watchmaker's family hid Jews above the shop and went to the camps for it. Still the most widely read account of ordinary Christian resistance. Buy on Bookshop →

Hitler's Cross
How the German church was captured — the compromises, the flattery, and the swastika laid over the cross. Written as a warning, not a history lesson. Buy on Bookshop →
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