Dorothee Soelle - Mystic and Rebel: The Biography

Renate Wind has composed a well-researched and searching biography of Dorothee Soelle (19292003), who became a true religious provocateur and one of the most prolific and widely read theologians of the postwar period.

Born in Germany and educated at the University of Cologne, Soelle turned from literary studies to theology, concentrating on rethinking Christian convictions in light of World War II and the Holocaust. A poet and activist as well as theologian, after her arrival at Union Theological Seminary in 1974, where she assumed the post previously held by Paul Tillich, Soelle became a leading voice for the liberation of women and against militarism, especially the Vietnam War. Her person, work, travels, and the times themselves combined to make her a pioneer and leader in the most exciting developments of the period: political theology, feminist theology, and liberation theology. Among her influential works were Christ the Representative (1967), Suffering (1975), To Work and to Love (1984), Theology for Skeptics (1994), and The Silent Cry (2001).

Winds short and insightful biography is informed by extensive interviews with Soelles friends and family, especially her husband, Fulbert Steffensky, by use of the familys archives, and by Winds extensive knowledge of contemporary theology, political history, and the contemporary church.

Author: Martin H. Rumscheidt
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 04/15/2012
Pages: 203
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.60w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780800698089

Review Citation(s):
Christian Century 10/16/2013 pg. 27

About the Author
Rumscheidt, Martin H.: -

Martin Rumscheidtis an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada and retired professor of historical theology at the University of Windsor, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Charles University, Prague. He is the translator of Act and Being (1996)in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, and cotranslator with the late Barbara Rumscheidt of Soelles Against the Wind (1999) and The Silent Cry.

Lukens, Nancy: -

Nancy Lukensis Professor Emerita of German and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her translations include among others three volumes in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition: Sanctorum Communio (1998, with Reinhard Krauss), Fiction from Tegel Prison (2000), and Bonhoeffers prison poetry and late correspondence in Letters and Papers from Prison (2010), as well as Daughters of Eve: Women Writers of the German Democratic Republic (1993). She and her husband, Martin Rumscheidt, are co-translators of Soelles The Mystery of Death (2007).

Wind, Renate: -

Renate Wind lives in Heidelberg and is Professor of Biblical Theology and Church History at the Evangelische Hochschule Nurnberg. She has been engaged for many years in the peace movement and is author of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel (1991).

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