Word: niebuhrs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Niebuhr's fresh, demanding analysis brought theological ethics into the midst of the secular arena, influencing the pragmatic liberalism of many prominent Americans, including George Kennan, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and James Reston. Niebuhr was a prime mover in Americans for Democratic Action and New York's Liberal Party. His political biography reads like a history of the left in his time: socialist disillusionment with capitalism, then with Marxism; pacifism, later abandoned during the rise of American isolationism and European fascism in the 1930s; cold war strategy to counter Communist expansion, followed by apprehensions about U.S. power...
...Niebuhr was often a step ahead of history. In 1932, he advised Negroes to organize Gandhian campaigns of nonviolent coercion rather than count on white benevolence. He first protested military involvement in Viet Nam when John F. Kennedy was President...
...Niebuhr was a preacher's kid from Missouri who said that he got into Yale Divinity School because they were hard up for students; his degree was from Elmhurst (Ill.) College, a small, then unaccredited school run by his Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Synod of North America, now part of the United Church of Christ. "I desired relevance rather than scholarship," he recalled and, rather than earn a doctorate, he plunged into an industrial parish in Detroit. His 13 years as pastor there honed his moral passion. After visiting a sick, unemployed Ford worker in 1927, he wrote bitterly...
Before World War II, Niebuhr seemed almost singlehandedly to goad idealistic Protestants into supporting the imminent war against Nazism; he founded the journal Christianity and Crisis to promote his views. Once that war ended, it was the growing power of the Soviet bloc that worried him. Communism was "cruel and fanatical," he wrote, because of its illusion that private property caused the sins of man and any means was justifiable to eradicate...
During his active years, Niebuhr was a 17-hour-a-day dynamo who kept students breathless with rapid, challenging lectures and intense conversations in his unostentatious, book-lined office in the seminary tower. He lived a disciplined, mildly ascetic life and produced 17 major books, plus a torrent of trenchant speeches and articles-often turned out at the last minute. Generous but no word mincer, Niebuhr called pacifists "parasites," death-of-God theologians "infants," and White House religious services "complacent conformity." In 1952, he had a heart attack, the first of several physical ailments that slowed but did not stop...