The Christianity Today history blog has just posted a piece by me on the British mystery author and lay theologian Dorothy L. Sayers. And yes, the great modern theologian Karl Barth not only enjoyed Sayers’s detective stories, but called her one of the “outstanding British theologians.” He himself translated three of her essays into German.
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We share with all the saints one Lord
Francis of Assisi--part of an altarpiece by Bartolomeo Vivarini, in the Brooklyn Museum
From a mid-15th-century Dutch prayerbook: Saint James the Great; Saint Joseph; Saint Ghislain, abbot of St Ghislain, near Mons; Saint Eligius; Saint Ermes (Hermes)
Gregory the Great and St. Mamertinus, from a 14th-century French translation of Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea
Cologne Cathedral
The clocktower of the Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles church in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt (Val-d'Oise), France
Masaccio, Crucifixion, 1426 (Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte); the blonde figure is Mary Magdalen
Door of Tewkesbury Abbey cloister
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 
Dear Chris, Could you tell me please, which where the Three titles of Sayers which Karl Bart translated to German? I am a Scholar on Sayers and that infomation would be of great help.
Racking my brains. I ran across this in, I believe, one of the biographies. Said he had used Sayers as a sort of aid to learning English, but also considered her an “outstanding British theologian” and translated three essays into German. Sorry, I can’t seem to track more than that through my research notes.
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Thanks again. I just ordered a couple of your suggestions. I have a sabbatical coming up next summer and I’ll put these on the sabbatical stack.
Chris — where would you recommend that we start in reading Sayers?
Chris:
For her lay theology, Letters To a Diminished Church or (more philosophical and extended) Mind of the Maker
For her novels, The Nine Tailors or Strong Poison. The latter is the beginning of the Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey series. The top of her novelistic craft
For her translation, her Penguin edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy
For her drama, find a used edition of a book or anthology that includes her Just Vengeance (her biographer and friend Barbara Reynolds told me she thinks this is still the most produce-able of Sayers’s Canterbury Festival plays), or Emperor Constantine, or Man Born To Be King
ABOUT her theology, Laura Simmons’s Creed Without Chaos.