Stupidity a l á Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a keen observer of human beings and their history. His profound and acute observations about his German contemporaries who fell prey to Hitler and the Nazi phenomenon are striking in their own right. They appear downright prescient as America faces what can only be judged a cognate phenomenon with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Bonhoeffer describes what he calls “Stupidity” in an essay “On Stupidity” in his Letters and Papers from Prison . The essay describes this kind of person, probes the nature of their “stupidity,” and observes appropriate responses to them (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison: DBW 8 (Kindle Location 1475-1504). Augsburg Fortress. Kindle Edition). Description of “Stupid” People These people are not malicious or evil. They cannot be made or convinced to forswear their stupidity. Their prejudgments are immovable overruling or dismissing contrary evidence. Stupid people...
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The Christians Who Said No To Nazism
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/06/08/the-christians-who-said-no-to-nazism/ Jun 8 2014 @ 9:28am <img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-243035" src="http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/wikipedia-karlbarth01.jpg?w=580&h=481" alt="Wikipedia-karlbarth01" width="580" height="481" /> On the 80th anniversary of its signing, Dale Coulter looks back at the Barmen Declaration , a statement largely written by the theologian Karl Barth “on behalf of the German Evangelical Church, a federal union of Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches” that proffered a “resounding ‘no’ to the political agenda of the Third Reich.” One of its insights? Everybody worships something: To frame everything in terms of acts of worship, as [the Barmen Declaration] does, places the situation squarely in terms of competing claims to lordship. As social animals, humans enter into a web of ...