My most recent publication: Helmut Gollwitzer & Marxism

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This has been in circulation since Monday, and it is time to acknowledge it here as well.

The Other Journal has published a short essay I wrote for them entitled, “The Blame Lies with the Christians: Helmut Gollwitzer’s Engagement with Marxist Criticism of Religion.” This essay discusses a touch of Gollwitzer’s biography dealing with his interaction with Marxism, before spending most of its time elucidating both what Gollwitzer made of the Marxist criticism of religion (as I describe his thinking, “Marxist criticism of religion is the weaponization of Feuerbach’s criticism”), and what impact it had on Gollwitzer’s theology.

Here is the conclusion to wet your appetites. Be sure to surf over and read the whole thing!
Helmut Gollwitzer’s work is a timely and invaluable resource in the contemporary North American sociopolitical climate, which is dominated by economic hardship for the many while the moneyed elite amass ever-greater hordes of wealth. As one who engaged deeply and critically with Marxism and its criticism of religion, Gollwitzer can serve as a guide for our own sometimes painful but always necessary efforts to rethink theology and Christian social responsibility—indeed, to rethink the gospel in its manifold significance—for our own time and place.

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