Like the book these are words to mull over and chew on. But liberating for many, including myself.
Glad for these posts, Scot. A good reminder of the value of this book, and not to let it out of sight once we’ve read it.

Bonhoeffer’s words on retreats (and would this extend too to feel-good religious conferences?) are interesting …On the one hand, Dorothy Day, who was living in Christian community with the alcoholics, the mentally ill, the trash, smells, lice and noise of the slums, as she called them, writes in her journals of being helped by religious retreats.
However, retreats and conferences can create a restless sense of being a substitute for living the faith, can create a group of retreat and conference junkies/groupies who pop up at everything, can offer a promise that people who are coming will have a canned “experience” of “uplift,” which is different from real life. One retreat I attended was jolted out of its placidity by one individual’s anger and challenges, and other people murmured “this wasn’t what I came for,” and complained that this retreat was not “so uplifting as the year before,” which points, I think, directly to what B is talking about.
So are there ways to go into retreats that are better than others? Do we have to come for the “right reasons?” And what are those reasons?

“Nothing is easier than to stimulate the euphoria of community in a few days of life together [a retreat, a conference]; and nothing is more fatal to the healthy, sober, everyday life in community of Christians” (47″
I agree because retreats don’t require ongoing relationship with other christians, by which we learn what it is to love one another because there is the possibility of being close/intimate. There is opportunity in ongoing relationships to rub up against things about another person that bug us and learn to love them within that. Plus the added benefit of repeated contact with their love for one’s self, being able to share that love.

Scot, do you know if there is a version of LT auf Deutsch available somewhere?
Dana

Dana, I have that German edition and it is a beautiful binding. On the bottom of the Amazon page, go to the German page. Type in name and title and the publisher is Christian Kaiser Verlag, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke Bande 5 in 1987. I’ve read my German one twice.

Thanks.
D.

The English translation I read was pretty clunky in places. Time for a new one?