The Picky Reader THE PICKY READER A curated bookstore
Military History

The Church & the World Wars

by The Picky Reader

What happens to the church when the state goes to war — and when it goes wrong. These books cover the religious fervour of 1914, the German church's collapse and the small resistance inside it, and the people who paid for saying no.

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The Great and Holy War
1.

The Great and Holy War

Philip Jenkins · HarperOne

1914 was preached as a holy war on every side. Jenkins recovers the religious frenzy of the First World War and what it left behind. Buy on Bookshop →

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
2.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Eric Metaxas · Thomas Nelson (rev. ed.)

The bestselling life, and the reason most readers know Bonhoeffer at all. Vivid and moving — read alongside Marsh, below, which historians consider the more reliable portrait. Buy on Bookshop →

Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
3.

Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Charles Marsh · Vintage

The scholarly standard. Marsh gives you a more complicated and more human Bonhoeffer than the martyr of popular memory. Buy on Bookshop →

The Cost of Discipleship
4.

The Cost of Discipleship

Dietrich Bonhoeffer · Touchstone

Written as the German church was capitulating, and sharpened by it. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Buy on Bookshop →

Letters and Papers from Prison
5.

Letters and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer · Touchstone

The Tegel letters — theology worked out in a cell, unfinished, and all the more searching for it. Buy on Bookshop →

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow
6.

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow

ed. Dean G. Stroud · Eerdmans

Sermons actually preached in the Third Reich, with the context that makes them legible. The nerve required is on every page. Buy on Bookshop →

The Hiding Place
7.

The Hiding Place

Corrie ten Boom · Chosen Books

A Dutch watchmaker's family hid Jews above the shop and went to the camps for it. Still the most widely read account of ordinary Christian resistance. Buy on Bookshop →

Hitler's Cross
8.

Hitler's Cross

Erwin W. Lutzer · Moody Publishers

How the German church was captured — the compromises, the flattery, and the swastika laid over the cross. Written as a warning, not a history lesson. Buy on Bookshop →

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