Word: reinhold
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...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...
...uncouth country bumpkin with decidedly dubious scholarly credentials," as Historian Richard Fox characterizes him, was the young Reinhold Niebuhr. Over the next four decades he was to become the nation's best-known theologian and political preacher, his Teutonic scowl etched on the face of 20th century American Protestantism...
Despite his stature, there has until now been no full-dress biography of Niebuhr, who died in 1971 at age 78. Fox, who teaches at Oregon's Reed College, fills the gap with Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, to be issued next week by Pantheon (340 pages; $19.95). It is an admirable work, appreciative but not uncritical, enriched but not burdened by meticulous research. Though Niebuhr's ideas are skillfully woven into the story, Fox offers a life, not a theology text...
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...