Word: niebuhrs
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...story was told many times over the years, Graham says he took a walk late at night and prayed. He didn't understand everything in the Bible. But he decided to accept it, and preach it, without apology. In years to come critics like Reinhold Niebuhr would challenge his preaching as too simple, too far removed from the complexity of the human condition. But not even Niebuhr questioned the sincerity of Graham's faith or motives. And neither, contrary to Hitchens, did Templeton. "I disagree with him profoundly on his view of Christianity and think that much of what...
...once again, American leaders refused. They hewed to containment, a policy premised on a very different mind-set. "The advocates of preventive war with Russia assume that Russia will grow stronger and we will get weaker," argued theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose writing influenced the Truman Administration. "Their calculations are not only strategically mistaken but morally wrong." "NSC-68," which outlined the Truman Administration's cold war strategy, predicted it was Moscow that would eventually falter, because the "idea of freedom" is "peculiarly and intolerably subversive of slavery...
...become popular only in recent years. It traces its remote origins in part to the teachings of a Greek philosopher, Epictetus, a former slave who developed a science of happiness. Perhaps the best-known expression of Epictetus' philosophy is the Serenity Prayer, attributed to the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous: "God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference...
...Niebuhr's most important achievement was countering what he considered the naiveté of activist Protestant liberals by rediscovering sin. In their viewpoint, humanity was good by nature, awaiting perfection through social reform and education. Although Niebuhr was thoroughly a modernist in theology and did not believe in the literal truth of Scripture, he found the doctrine of the Fall--humanity's lapse from its original moral purity--to be a telling myth. The race, he asserted, is ineradicably given to self-deception, and in the real world the search for moral righteousness is filled with ambiguity. His approach became known...
...book is the subject of a forthcoming issue of Christianity and Crisis, a biweekly journal of opinion founded by Niebuhr in February 1941.[*] In one article, William Lee Miller of the University of Virginia notes that few students today seem inspired by Niebuhr's thought, and questions "what his lasting place in the history of American thought, of theology, of political philosophy, will be." But Fox's depiction of Niebuhr in his prime makes him stand tall in comparison with today's political pulpiteers. A reading of the biography, followed by a good dose of Niebuhrian realism, might benefit...