It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.

When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless ‘freedom of worship’ for ‘freedom of religion’.

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

The worlds of folklore and religion were so mingled in early twentieth venture German culture that even families who didn't go to church were often deeply Christian.

Belief in God is an act of faith. But so is believing our existence is simply the result of chance.

The family trees of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer are everywhere so laden with figures of accomplishment that one might expect future generations to be burdened by it all. But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seemed to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them.