Wayfinding with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Off the Beaten Path and into the Kingdom

Picking up a fresh metaphor from the field of urban planning, Wayfinding with Dietrich Bonhoeffer applies a “wayfinding” lens to consider how Bonhoeffer might be a wayfinder for followers of Christ today. Wayfinding provides an accessible entry point into Bonhoeffer’s biography and body of work for any reader desiring to learn from the historical witness of a thoughtful, dynamic, and focused German pastor-scholar who took a courageous, early, and long-suffering stand against the powers of Nazism. King and Thomas travel with Bonhoeffer off the beaten path and into the kingdom of God, considering six selected themes from Bonhoeffer’s dynamic, brief life with import for contemporary Christians. With wayfinding cues and questions to help guide readers deeper into the territory of Bonhoeffer’s example, Wayfinding invites readers to learn the skills of weaving together the past, present, and future to inhabit the present with faithfulness to Christ in our cultural moment.

Jonathan D. King is an active father of three young children and a writer for the Cancer Center at Illinois. King and Thomas also host this book's companion podcast, Wayfinding.

Jonathan David King is a husband, father of three, and writer living in the micro-urban university town of Champaign, Illinois.

Jonathan's writing carries with him experiences of a childhood in rural southern Illinois, an exchange student at the University of Cape Town, several years living and serving in the Binghampton neighborhood of Memphis, TN with Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) practitioners, volunteer programs with refugees, immigrants, and international students, and starting neighborhood house churches in Memphis, TN and in Champaign, IL. He formerly served as a campus minister at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he now works as a writer for a cancer research institute, the Cancer Center at Illinois.

Jonathan holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts in Religion from Urbana Theological Seminary, where his thesis was Confession and Resistance: The Reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by South African Church Struggle Leaders during Apartheid (1948-1994).

Jonathan is affiliated with Life Together House in Urbana, Illinois, and the Order of the Common Life, an ecumenical monastic order for the 21st century.

Jonathan also writes the Words in the Wild newsletter on Substack.