Word: niebuhrs
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From Detroit, Niebuhr traveled around the country on one social crusade after another. After moving to Union seminary, he remained as much preacher as scholar and commonly taught his last Friday class with a packed suitcase behind the lectern so he could rush off to weekend speaking engagements...
...Union years saw head-spinning political changes in Niebuhr. Although he ran for Congress on the Socialist ticket, he later came to accept the capitalism, tempered by welfare programs, of the New Deal. Niebuhr led the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, but later railed against isolationist clergy and supported America's entry into World...
Unlike many leftists, he was notably consistent in distrusting Communism as dogmatic and needlessly violent. After World War II, Niebuhr became a kind of intellectual chaplain of the cold war, defining Communism in 1953 as "an organized evil which spreads terror and cruelty throughout the world." These views did not preclude the FBI from subjecting him to a "full-field" loyalty investigation...
Among his other talents, Niebuhr had a gift for aphoristic paradox. He addressed the dilemma of the new nuclear age by decreeing atomic weapons to be "our ultimate insecurity and our immediate security." One of his best-known lines appeared in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944): "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...
...Niebuhr, who considered himself a "teacher of social ethics" rather than a theologian, became more interested in spiritual themes as his thought matured. His major statement of theology appeared in The Nature and Destiny of Man (two volumes, 1941 and 1943). Fox shows how profoundly Reinhold's evolution was influenced by the counsel of his younger brother H. Richard, a brilliant Yale theology professor who was painfully aware that he always stood in Reinhold's shadow...