About this episode

Gary Dorrien discusses the life and impact of Reinhold Niebuhr in a live Q&A format.

Gary Dorrien is the Niebuhr Chair at Union, and nobody alive can walk you through the whole arc of Reinhold Niebuhr with his range — from the German-American pastor's kid at Elmhurst and Eden, to the Yale divinity student who felt like a country boy among thoroughbreds, to the Detroit preacher at Bethel Church writing articles in 1916 begging German Americans to prove their Americanism months before Wilson took the country into war, to the young professor at Union who felt like an imposter for a decade and overcompensated by ridiculing everyone in sight, to the author of Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), the bomb that ended the social gospel's fifty-year run and rerouted the entire field of American social ethics overnight. This is the second live Q&A for the Theology for Troublemakers class, and Gary, Aaron Stauffer, and I work through student questions covering the whole trajectory: why Niebuhr still towers over the field; what H. Richard's devastating private letter did to his brother's theology; how he metabolized Augustine into Christian realism in the Gifford Lectures that became Nature and Destiny; why Children of Light and Children of Darkness (1944) is the road…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guest: Gary Dorrien

Topics covered

• Reinhold Niebuhr
• Christian realism
• social ethics
• Theology for Troublemakers
• Americanism
• neoconservatism

Keywords

• Niebuhr
• Dorrien
• Christian ethics
• Theology
• American social gospel
• Q&A
• philosophy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Union, Bethel Church, AAR

Books & works: Moral Man and Immoral Society, Nature and Destiny, Children of Light and Children of Darkness

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