After Ten Years: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times
After Ten Years could be included in the timeless body of texts that includes Martin Luther King’s Letter to a Birmingham Jail and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s No Religion is an Island—writings that addressed the specific challenges of their times by speaking to the greater issues at stake. Those issues include the human capacity in all ages for decency, for courage, and for an engagement in political culture that affirms these values and honors human integrity. In whatever particular historical moment we find ourselves, we are summoned to determine what our place in history will be, to think and act beyond our self-interest for the sake of a common good: not just the common good of the moment, our particular political group, or even our society, but of our times—to act, as Bonhoeffer put it, on behalf of history itself and for the sake of future generations and the kind of society we would wish for them.