Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr, the great American theologian of the ironies of history, got his quadrennial dusting-off in 2008, with Barack Obama, among others, averring a deep intellectual debt to him. Yet the secular millenarianism—the tacit acceptance of the redemption of a fallen world through politics—that pervaded the Obama campaign was a perfect example of the kind of utopianism that Niebuhr, with his profound sense of the contingencies of history and the self-delusory capacities of human beings, spent the better part of three decades warning against. --George Weigel, A Campaign of Narratives, First Things, March 2009

It is upon this rock that many of Niebuhr's followers today stumble so conspicuously. They invoke his prophetic stance but pretend his political jeremiads never reckoned with personal sin. They laud his campaign against utopianism, yet seem blithely unaware of the delusions about human goodness that sustain modern liberalism. They echo his call for political humility, yet neglect the religious truths that make genuine humility possible. --Joseph Loconte, The Irony of American Politics, Books & Culture, November/December 2008, review of The Irony of American History (1952), by Reinhold Niebuhr

Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.") --Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr The New York Times, September 18, 2005

What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr, by Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009, review of The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich, and The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did), by James Traub

Memoir of 'growing up Niebuhr' starts from timeless prayer, review by Carlin Romano of The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, by Elisabeth Sifton, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 2004

Was Reinhold Niebuhr a Christian? by Gabriel Fackre, First Things, October 2002

Niebuhr the Teacher, by Matthew Berke, First Things, February 1993

The Self and the Dramas of History, by Reinhold Niebuhr, review by Ludwig Freund, Modern Age, Summer 1957