He suffered many health ailments as a child, including rickets, food allergies, a weak left eye and a hernia that required him to wear an iron truss, and his German heritage in the 1930s and 1940s subjected him to the very forms of prejudice he would later oppose in his Christian ministries.

[9] An exceedingly thin child, at a young age he could not participate in competitive sports, though he would develop into a large, husky man with a football player's build.

Although Schweitzer enjoyed life as a philosopher, musician, and biblical scholar, he was plagued by "the thought that I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course, but must give something in return for it.

A pietistic movement, the Faith Tract Mission was a fundamentalist brand of Christianity that was in rebellion to the more formal, established Catholic and Lutheran churches of Europe.

Through his relationship and talks with Wiznat, Steinbruck "suddenly discovered," as he told the Washington Jewish Week in 1990, "that religion and faith could be respectable and did not require believing in three impossible things before breakfast every morning.

There, Steinbruck was taught by energetic young professors who had studied under the top theologians of Europe - men such as John Reumann, William Lazareth, Robert Bornemann, and Theodore Tappert, intellectual leaders in the Lutheran Church in America.

Light years ahead of Steinbruck in her devotion to the church, Erna worked long hours volunteering at a Lutheran settlement house in Northeast Philadelphia, where she assisted young children and helped displaced refugees.

[8] Years later, when the Steinbrucks had put into place a consortium of shelters and clinics servicing the homeless in Washington, D.C., it was typically Erna who worked tirelessly behind the scenes preparing the food, fixing the plumbing, keeping out the rats, and making the beds.

It was in the city that Steinbruck found his true calling, confronting the effects of racism, discrimination, homelessness, economic inequality, and the injustices of American society.

Steinbruck served for ten years at St. John's Lutheran Church[17] in Easton, Pennsylvania, a depressed industrial town with a melting pot of cultures and ethnicity.

As some of his congregants were working-class blacks, Steinbruck became sensitized to issues that most suburban pastors avoided - racially discriminatory practices in every aspect of the community - that required action more than prayer.

In an attempt to confront the racial and other injustices in American society at that time, the three men formed an interfaith coalition, which they dubbed "ProJeCt of Easton", an acronym for Protestant, Jewish, Catholic.

[23] The Six-Day War a recent memory, Steinbruck experienced first hand the positive exuberance of the Jewish homeland, its Zionist ideals of community, security, and cooperation.

He visited the Western Wall, walked the streets of historic Jerusalem, touched the waters of Jordan and Galilee, and experienced the celebration of life - and constant fear of attack - that embraces Israel's daily routine.

[16] On another occasion, in September 1985, during the Jewish High Holidays, Steinbruck and three others, including a Catholic priest, were arrested for holding signs with anti-Soviet slogans across the street from the embassy.

"[28] He was deeply influenced by the writings of Krister Stendahl, a former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, who authored a seminal work on the Apostle Paul, which argued that the Covenant of Sinai remained at once valid and viable, and that Christianity was historically and theologically wrong in attempting to fulfill an evangelistic "mission" to the Jewish people.

Steinbruck found this work liberating, believing that the history of proselytizing among the Jews was responsible for much of their brutalization and suffering, including the Inquisition and centuries of persecution, culminating in the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust.

Upon their arrival in Moscow, Steinbruck, Brake, and two women members of the delegation were detained by Soviet officials and questioned for hours about the purpose of their trip.

[33] Steinbruck discovered the meaning of kiddush haShem, to sanctify God's name and to pursue justice at all costs, from the teachings of Seymour Siegel, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

This concept, together with the writings of other great theologians - Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel among them - helped Steinbruck develop a central message, which eventually would define much of his life's work.

[16] Steinbruck also found meaningful the writings and teachings of Henri Nouwen, the Dutch-born Catholic priest who authored many famous and well-read books on spirituality, hospitality, and the belovedness of God.

Just five blocks from the White House – "King's Palace" as he used to call it[8] – the church straddled an invisible border at 14th and N Streets between the halls of power, including embassies, fancy restaurants, and posh hotels, and the city's red light district, encompassing some of the nation's worst urban blight.

Inspired by Matthew 25 ("I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me"), Luther Place established an emergency shelter, first with blankets, later mattresses, sprawled on the floor of the church sanctuary.

Conditions were primitive at first, but in time more and more volunteers appeared as the church became instantly filled wall-to-wall each night; in the words of Steinbruck, "the grapevine community network reached the forsaken.

"[35] What eventually emerged was the N Street Village, a diverse consortium of services that help the homeless regain their self-confidence, develop life skills, and prepare, step-by-step, to return to mainstream society.

[36] Today, helped by a combination of congressional and foundation grants,[37] and thousands of individual contributors, the N Street Village is a four-story, $17.9 million complex made up of shelters and clinics that offer food, clothing, housing, medical care, and social and psychiatric services to homeless women and their children.

[43] In explaining his vision for LVC, Steinbruck recalled the work of Albert Schweizer, who turned his back on a brilliant career to volunteer as a physician in the heart of Africa, learning first-hand the importance of "reverence for life.

"[46] When eight Sanctuary Movement workers were convicted in Tucson, Arizona, in May 1986 for sheltering Central American refugees, Steinbruck criticized the Justice Department and compared President Reagan to King Herod.

Steinbruck's most notorious arrest occurred on September 18, 1973, when he gained admission to the Air Force Association Nuclear Arms Technology Exhibition, held at a Washington Hotel.

The Steinbruck Center provides research and training opportunities for students and adults of all ages to learn how to effectively address the root causes of homelessness and urban poverty.