Acknowledge anxiety’s capacity to instruct. Kierkegaard speaks of being educated by anxiety as an apprenticeship with truth—an opening, an exposure to our ownmost fragility. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”: it strips away every false security and brings us face to face with the desperate, idolatrous ways we deny our selfish desires. Read More

IIf a federal agent intent on advancing an ‘America First’ agenda in the nation’s universities were to review the syllabus of my undergraduate course the Kingdom of God in America, they might assume I was a reliable ally of the campus’s conservative minority. “Why the Woke Left Makes Nothing Happen” was the title of one section exploring the late 1960s countercultural movements. Read More

April 23, 2025

In this second part of our conversation with Dr. Charles Marsh, we dive deeper into the moments that shaped Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vocation as a pastor theologian. From Harlem to Rome to a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria, we explore how Bonhoeffer’s encounters with global Christianity—and especially the Black Church in America—inspired his vision of a concrete, lived theology. Read More

March 21, 2025

In an article published by Religion News titled “Both right and left claim Bonhoeffer as a champion. Here’s why his ideas fit neither,” Charles Marsh explores the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s politics, particularly how he is used by both the right and left as a champion, when his Christian behavior and attitude fit neither. Read More

March 21, 2025

How did Dietrich Bonhoeffer become the theologian and pastor we remember today? Cardigan and Collar podcast in conversation with Dr. Charles Marsh. Read More

February 24, 2025
By Charles Marsh

Director Charles Marsh wrote this essay in January of 2013 about the vision of justice and mercy of Martin Luther King Jr. Read More

January 6, 2025
by Charles Marsh

The Rev. Dr. Charles Robert Marsh, a Southern Baptist minister who served as senior pastor at Atlanta’s Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church from 1978 to 1993 died on Christmas Eve while in hospice care at Lenbrook in Atlanta, Georgia. Marsh, a passionate teacher of the Bible, and a local religious leader in the desegregation of public schools in the South, was 92-years old. Read More

December 2, 2024
by Charles Marsh

I shared this short essay with my students recently. It’s a piece I wrote for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin in Spring 2005. Several students in the class thought it speaks directly to the current situation, so we’re sharing it here in Theology Now! The idea of holy silence and political resistance came to me while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, in the section on “silence before, under, and coming out of the Word”, when Bonhoeffer writes of a silence that brings “purification, clarification, and concentration upon the essential thing”; which I would develop in my 2007 book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (Oxford University Press). Read More

September 16, 2024
by Peter Slade

I have had a ringside seat as our culture war burned over Ashland, Ohio: a small college town that has long claimed to be the “World HQ of Nice People.” For 18 years, I have watched the town’s institutions–the Library and School Board, the City Council, the University, the Press, and churches– twist, turn, and some even break. I have spent my academic life studying Christians and churches in desperately divisive and morally demanding situations; now, I find myself in just such a situation. What, I have been wondering, does it mean to live faithfully and wisely in these times? Read More

August 14, 2024

Adams share her personal story and experience during the civil rights movement, and the role that her faith played in it. Moses reads a story that he has written about some of the people he knew in the movement, including Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. Read More

August 6, 2024

When the interview began it was hard for me to reconcile the man before me—calm and almost elegant in his pinstriped suit—with everything else I knew of him: that he had reigned over a campaign of terror in 1960s Mississippi. On that night, in the summer of 1994, the former Imperial Wizard of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had not yet been convicted of murder—nor for his part in the 1964 deaths of James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, nor in the 1966 firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer. Read More

July 17, 2024

In this recent exchange with award-winning filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, Charles Marsh discusses the Barmen Declaration and Bonhoeffer’s theological critique of its limits. Read More