Wisdom to Know the Difference
Reinhold Niebuhr He looks so benign. Who could even guess this avuncular baldy was mid-century America's answer to Machiavelli? Reinhold Niebuhr's career was the ecclesial and academic equivalent of Barack Obama's rise to the Presidency. Niebuhr was an ordained minister in the Evangelical Church, a mainline Protestant denomination (this was in the days before "Evangelical" became synonymous with "reactionary") of primarily German immigrants. Niebuhr's first and, it turned out, only parish was in Detroit. It was small when he arrived, large by the time he left, but that probably had as much to do with demographic shifts as anything else: Detroit was growing by leaps and bounds as the auto industry matured. If his memoir of those years, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic , makes clear, he was frequently neglectful of the more mundane aspects of the pastorate, preferring instead to nurture a developing career as an activist and theologic...