This is the first English language volume of essays on the life and work of Dorothee Soelle (1929-2003). In the words of editor Sarah K. Pinnock, assistant professor of Contemporary Religious Thought at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas: "She is a leader among German Christians in grappling with the collective shame of Auschwitz. She is a poet expressing utopian longings for a better world and the beauty of the here and now. She is a political activist and a socialist, an admirer of Karl Marx, and a liberation theologian who challenges doctrinal orthodoxy and institutional complacency. She is a mystic offering a vision of faith for people disillusioned with bourgeois Christianity."
This inspiring collection begins with three writings by Soelle: "The World Can Be Different," a speech delivered one month after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States; "The Guarantor of Poor People's Rights" where she explores the connections between protest, prayer, and injustice; and "Breaking the Ice of the Soul" where she examines poetry and the place of literature in theology. The twelve essays in the paperback are arranged under the following thematic categories: New Forms of Theological Language, Suffering and Redemption, Mysticism, and Theological Liberation. The last three pieces by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Carter Heyward, and Beverly Wildung Harrison are the most incisive.
A quotation by Dorothee Soelle on Jesus gives an example of her hard-hitting perspective: "It is possible to see who this Jesus really was: the illegitimate son of a poor girl, a teenager; a worker who belonged to the landless; a poor man in every sense of the word, living among poor, insignificant people, a nobody from a provincial town; a crackpot who was 'out of his mind' as his family decided; a subversive who was sought by the authorities; a political prisoner who was tortured and finally condemned to death."
