Who: Best-selling author Eric Metaxas
What: Special lecture on the life of Holocaust Upstander Dietrich Bonhoeffer; booking signing to follow of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2010)
When: October 11, 2010 at 5:30 p.m.
Where: The Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance, 211 N. Record Street, Dallas, Texas 75202
Best-selling biographer Eric Metaxas will be the special guest speaker at a lecture event at the Dallas Holocaust Museum on October 11 that will explore the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young Lutheran theologian in Hitler’s Germany who stood up to the Third Reich and was executed for doing so.
Admission to the event is free for Circle of Remembrance members of the Museum, $10 for other Museum members and $15 for the general public. Free parking is available for the event in the Museum’s parking lot at the northwest corner of Houston and the DART track crossing.
Metaxas, author of The New York Times bestseller Amazing Grace, which tells tbhe story of the remarkable life of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and which later became a major motion picture, will discuss Bonhoeffer’s brief but powerful life.
Joseph Loconte, a book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal said, “In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas tells Bonhoeffer’s story with passion and theological sophistication, often challenging revisionist accounts that make Bonhoeffer out to be a ‘humanist’ or ethicist for whom religious doctrine was easily disposable. In Bonhoeffer we meet a complex, provocative figure: an orthodox Christian who, at a grave historical moment, rejected what he called ‘cheap grace’—belief without bold and sacrificial action.”
After a failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested on charges of assisting Jews and subverting Nazi policies, Loconte notes. Two years later, in early April 1945—after his full involvement in the conspiracy became known—Bonhoeffer was executed at the Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria. By all accounts he faced with courage and serenity the ultimate consequence of his choices.
A book signing will follow the lecture event, with proceeds of book sales benefiting the education programs of the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance. For more information, visit http://www.dallasholocaustmuseum.org or call 214-741-7500. For more information on Metaxas, visit his website, http://www.ericmetaxas.com/about-eric/
