The Seminarian Who Almost Skipped Harlem

In 1930, a young German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, largely unimpressed. He found the academic theology thin and the students intellectually lazy. When his African American classmate Frank Fisher invited him to visit Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Bonhoeffer nearly declined. Harlem was not where serious theology happened — or so he assumed.…