Word: niebuhr
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...Sunday school kid knows that the best piece of Christian theology was written not by St. Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr but by Dr. Seuss. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! - the story of how the Whos joyfully celebrate Jesus' birth even after a spiteful wretch robs all their holiday stuff - portrays faith more meaningfully than any church father or Yale philosopher ever did. Published for Christmas 1957, the book's obvious target was Yuletide commercialization. But its deeper message - don't confuse the accessories of religion with religion itself - seems especially relevant for Roman Catholics like me on Easter...
...also recalls the title of Lionel Trilling’s 1950 classic, “The Liberal Imagination.” Writing an introduction to a posthumous collection of Trilling’s essays in 2000, Leon Wieseltier praised the literary critic—along with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—for remaining clear-eyed in dark times, a “rationalist with night vision.” It’s worth noting that David Brooks also invokes Niebuhr in a New York Times column this week discussing Obama?...
...Friday, the New York Times broke a story about the famous "Serenity Prayer," part of which is cited above. For decades, it has been routinely attributed to the great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He wrote it, according to most accounts, for a sermon he gave in the summer of 1943. So certain is his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, of its provenance, that she put out a book in 2003 about its connections with her father's views on peace and war. But the Times reports that an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine by a law librarian and quotation expert there...
...first question seems not immediately answerable. Sifton, Niehbuhr's daughter, says that her father preached around the country in the 1930s and could have introduced the prayer in his travels, prior to '43. The Yale Alumni article's writer, Fred Shapiro, told the Times he felt Niebuhr might have unconsciously lifted it. Quizzed on its origins in his lifetime, the theologian said, " "Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so. I honestly do believe I wrote it myself." You decide...
...date, delivered in late March in Los Angeles. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss him as a mouthpiece for McCain or as just another American neoconservative, for he is neither. Kagan is a realist, to be sure, reminiscent of earlier public intellectuals such as Raymond Aron, Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Lippmann. The Return of History clocks in at a mere 100 pages. Its style is conversational, and it feels more like a breezy lecture than a weighty foreign-policy tome. Still, its message is sober and its argument subtle...