On this day sixty-three years ago, Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged (actually slowly asphyxiated to death) at Flossenburg Prison, a mere three weeks before it was liberated by Allied forces. Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned for his role in the July 20 Plot, the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer was caught only when money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced back to the pastor.

Today is a day to remember the cost of discipleship:

Suffering then is the badge of true discipleship. The disciple is not above his master. . . . That is why Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true Church. . . . If we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering and rejection at the hands of men, we forfeit our fellowship with Christ and have ceased to follow Him. But if we lose our lives in His service and carry out cross, we shall find our lives again in the fellowship of the cross with Christ. The opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ and His cross and all the offense which the cross brings in its train. — The Cost of Discipleship (1937)

I would say this is splendid, but that’s not allowed. First Things writer Dimitri Cavalli sends along this amusing and instructive catalogue of writing dos and don’ts, compiled in 1915 by The Kansas City Star and given to Ernest Hemingway during his stint as a police and emergency-room reporter. Hemingway praised this guide as offering the “best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.” *Prospective FT authors, take heed!*

Here are some of the more edifying entries:

• A Woman of the Name of Mary Jones—Disrespect is attached to the individual in such sentences. Avoid it. Never use it even in referring to street walkers.
• Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc.
• Say evening clothes, not full dress. [A common error on our pages.]
• “He was made unconscious,” not “he was rendered unconscious.” “He died on the sidewalk” not “He fell dead on the sidewalk.”
• The police tried to find her husband, not tried to locate her husband. To locate, used as a transitive verb, means to establish.
• The Star does not use “dope” or “dope fiend.” Use habit forming drugs or narcotics and addicts.
• “He suffered a broken leg in a fall,” not “he broke his leg in a fall.” He didn’t break the leg, the fall did. Say a leg, not his leg, because presumably the man has two legs.
• “She was born in Ireland and came to Jackson County in 1874″ not “but came to Jackson County.” She didn’t come here to make amends for being born in Ireland. This is a common abuse of the conjunction.
• Such words as “tots,” “urchins,” and “mites of humanity” are not to be used in writing of children. In certain cases, where “kids” conveys the proper shading and fits the story, it is permissible.

And, a final word of wisdom: “He died of heart disease, not heart failure—everybody dies of heart failure.”

FOR THE MOST COMPLETE VIEW OF THE PAPAL VISIT, you will want to watch EWTN (check your cable listings), where Father Neuhaus will be cohosting with Raymond Arroyo the coverage of all events in Washington and New York. We are hopeful that Father Neuhaus will also have some daily postings on this website.

Kelefa Sanneh, long the New York Times’ hip-hop correspondent, now shifts his attention to theology in a New Yorker profile of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama’s pastor. Wright’s public avowal of the “black liberation theology” of James Cone raised eyebrows after the February airing of some of Wright’s sermons. Cone, as I documented in a recent essay, argued that Jesus was black, and that blacks are the Chosen People.

In Sanneh’s account, Rev. Wright goes well beyond James Cone in promulgating an Afrocentric theology, with a declared affinity for the Islam of Louis Farrakhan. As Sanneh reports:

Although Cone’s work had a major influence on him, Wright was carried along, too, by his own research and inclinations. He criticized Cone’s assertion that blacks “were completely stripped of their African heritage as they were enslaved,” and argued that the black Church should engage more with the African roots of its worshippers: he defined Trinity as “a congregation with a non-negotiable commitment to Africa.”…

Like Cone in the nineteen-sixties, Wright may have worried that he would be judged, and found wanting, by purer and less forgiving forms of black nationalism. Farrakhan represented the threat; his followers—particularly the young black men whom churches sometimes had trouble reaching—represented the prize.

Wright attended (but didn’t address) the Million Man March, the 1995 gathering in Washington that Farrakhan convened to promote self-reliance and “spiritual renewal” among black men. In the months afterward, Wright delivered a series of sermons that were reprinted in a book, “When Black Men Stand Up for God,” which presents a Christian response to the challenge posed by the Nation of Islam. In it, he lambastes the preachers who opposed the march on political or religious grounds: they had missed a prime opportunity to present their case to African-American men. And, by way of establishing his bona fides, he reminds readers that he studied Islam at the University of Chicago. “I have a different perspective on Islam than the average preacher,” he writes. “Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize. Islam comes out of Christianity.”

Presumably, Senator Obama didn’t hear those sermons, either.