A blown-up photo of 20th century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer is shown in an image gallery at the Becket Fund's Canterbury Medal Dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., May, 12, 2011. Author Eric Metaxas received the medal this year. | (Photo: The Christian Post) Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 to an aristocratic German family. Evidently gifted, he chose to study theology and swiftly graduate with a doctorate at the age of twenty-one. In the first of what were to be many international connections, he worked for two years with a German congregation in Barcelona. He then went to the United States to study for a year at a liberal theological college that he found shallow and uninspiring. He was, however, impressed by the African-American churches he worshipped at, appreciating the congregations’ zeal and sympathizing with the social injustices they endured.