Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof

Baum, a youth conference speaker and host of a young adults' radio program, provides an engaging biography of a revolutionary Christian in early 20th-century Germany. Inspired by religious vision and forced by his father to study theology, Arnold moved increasingly away from the state church, inspired an antibourgeois youth movement, and founded a community based on "common table, community of goods, communal work" but dedicated to marriage and to children. Arnold also influenced Barth, Tillich, and Buber and opposed Hitler. He is hence an important figure for both historians and scholars of contemporary religious thought, but this first biography on him is accessible and enjoyable reading for general audiences as well.