Bonhoeffer Moment(s)?: Learning to See "From Below" in Indian Country (original) (raw)
Recent claims that we live in a "Bonhoeffer Moment" traverse the ideological spectrum of the United States. This discourse, while enlightening, has unintentionally reproduced a limitation in Bonhoeffer's own thought. In 1979, Gustavo Gutiérrez observed that "the absence of social analysis prevented Bonhoeffer from carrying his intuition to its mature theological implications." Building on Gutiérrez's observation, I propose a reading of Bonhoeffer in "Indian Country," a dual designation of the American West and the informal US military designation of territories where war is being waged. In "After Ten Years," Bonhoeffer remarks that, for him, the ability to see "from below" was neither innate nor inevitable. Rather, his radical resistance was a result of a process of learning. If we are to live fully into a "Bonhoeffer Moment" in the United States, a similar process of learning among "the powerless, the oppressed, and reviled" is necessary.
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