Deitrich Bonhoeffer

Recently in my reading I have come across more than one reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose posthumous book Letters and Papers from Prison I can remember seeing on the bookshelf as I grew up. Based on the little I have learned of him so far I must say he deserved better than the cite he most recently received in the news.

Growing up seeing that book on the shelf, but never having read it, I never was sure when or where that prison was supposed to be. With the civil rights movement and apartheid being more often in the new I assumed it had been a prison either in the deep south or in South Africa. He had in fact been imprisoned by the Nazi's for participation in a church based underground organization after money that had helped jews flee the country was traced back to him, and later executed for ties to a plot within the abwehr to assassinate Hitler.

In looking up more about him I ran across a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., "If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and non-violence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer." I hope in history we shall rarely need to follow Bonhoeffer's lesson's on dealing with the conscienceless.

I am going to have to read more.

Nifty webcomic rediscovered

A few weeks ago I ran across Irrational Fears then promptly lost the address for it. Fortunately for myself I happened to realize that one of the people on archangelbeth's friends list ursulav was the artist. Yay!

Picture an artist turning herself into a Chupacabra, and in this form going out to confront the monsters she's been afraid of in her life. Starting with an Aztec monster, then moving on to face the Monster Under the Bed (saving a few, but not many, dust bunnies's lives in the process).

So having caught up on Slightly Damned, I shall read through more of Irrational Fears' archive. Oh, and if you haven't been reading Slightly Damned, it's cute and good too. A girl-creature finds herself in the afterlife, not allowed into heaven nor purgatory, but not bad enough to be locked away in hell. So she gets stuck in the absolute outermost ring, so far outside of hell proper it isn't considered by most to be part of hell. The Ring of the Slightly Damned. Placed under the watch of Buwaro, a demon that seems more like your good-natured but not-mentally-all-there relative that you can't help but be simultaneously amused and exasperated with.