Word: niebuhrs
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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...
Liberal Drift. "People always wonder about people of faith-whether they live it," remarks Niebuhr Biographer June Bingham. "The last 20 years of his life were years of severe pain. He bore them with grace and humor." In those same years a younger generation of Protestant liberals was drifting away from Niebuhr's concept of constantly contending self-interest to revolutionary, third-world romanticism. He had decried "a too-simple social radicalism [that] does not recognize how quickly the poor, the weak, the despised of yesterday may, on gaining a social victory over their detractors, exhibit the same arrogance...
...Ursula Niebuhr later became head of Barnard College's religion department. The Niebuhr teaching dynasty also included his late brother, eminent Yale Ethicist H. Richard; his late sister, Hulda, who taught education at McCormick Seminary; and his nephew, Harvard Theologian Richard Reinhold Niebuhr...
Died. Reinhold Niebuhr, 78, Protestant theologian and political thinker (see RELIGION...