I’m working my way through the archive of the BBC4 In Our Times religion podcast as a means of taking distance from the moment. As it happens, history crowds the moment. An episode from 2018 recounts that 3 weeks before he committed suicide Hitler ordered the execution of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The name of Bonhoefer brought back earnest, searching seminars conducted by my undergrad religion professor during the death-of-God heyday. 

Bonhoeffer is reported on the podcast to have been hanged from a meat hook with piano wire. Two hours elapsed before the Nazi doctor pronounced him dead and his corpse was taken to the crematorium; he didn’t die quickly — an egregiously cruel death (like crucifixion) inflicted on a good man by an egregiously bad man.

Avoid martyr stories. Considering how brutally the human species deals with its own kind, it’s not hard to embrace a notion of “original sin,” if it means the congenital taint of a species prone to wreaking atrocity upon its own kind. Is it impossible to imagine a world with less deity and more amity? One in which unicorns can fly?

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