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“... Nations,’ wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘will always find it more difficult than individuals to behold the beam that is in their own eye while they observe the mote that is in their brother’s eye; and individuals find it difficult enough.’ The last six words crystallise the thought. Niebuhr’s political writings are an exhortation – part history, part criticism, part sermon – to hold nations as closely as possible to the individual standard; to make them recognise that even when they oppose a great evil, what they themselves embody still includes much evil ...”

“... for anyone’s ‘thing’. Auden can satisfy his infantilism while subscribing to the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr; Huxley can freely investigate the subliminal Gods with the assistance of drugs; Isherwood can commune with Swami Prabhavananda along with any number of sun-tanned meditators and/or boyfriends. There is therefore a sequence to the ...”

“... have prospered on their mutual hostility, the no man’s land between them has grown desolate. The Niebuhr brothers (the subject of a stimulating essay by Richard Wightman Fox) were probably the last theologians to participate in, rather than merely comment on, public debates about moral and political values. Christian intellectuals have since found it ...”

“... many young Englishmen have felt; though not many young Englishmen in New York got to stay with Reinhold Niebuhr. The Oxford letters and diary are silent on the Benn apocrypha, which was current in the Seventies, that on more than one occasion he concealed his lack of effort by reading an essay to his tutor from a blank sheet of paper. The record is ...”

“... Kinsey Report’). Prominent intellectuals took notice, too, not always favourably. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr protested that Kinsey made orgasm ‘the summum bonum of his value scheme’; the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer charged that the only reliable figures in his skewed sampling came from ‘college graduates in six of the north-eastern ...”

“... to religion. He learned much from the rather severe but public-spirited Protestantism of Reinhold Niebuhr, and did not reject the religious experiences he had brought with him from England, notably a powerful memory of Charles Williams, in whose presence he had sensed a ‘personal sanctity’. Conscientious examination of his religious position ...”

“... was even further from scripture than Schleiermacher’s work was. Both Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr, the two most politically important American theologians of the 20th century, were, by ancestry and training, embedded in the German theological culture to which Lilla attends so closely. Niebuhr’s ideas ...”

“... and the Brightest about the making of the Vietnam catastrophe, more recently in biographies of Reinhold Niebuhr, McGeorge and William Bundy, John McCloy and George Kennan, among others. To many people (myself included) Niebuhr, for instance, was a serious theologian, a great preacher, a powerful intellectual ...”

“... of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from both right and left to ...”

“... and racial equality did not put it into practice. At the outset of the civil rights movement, Reinhold Niebuhr expressed his scepticism about moral suasion. ‘However large the number of individual white men who . . . will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not ...”

“... of argument implicit in Mishra’s account, and it has not been welcomed by those whom Mishra, via Reinhold Niebuhr, calls the ‘bland fanatics’ of ‘the religion of universal progress’. But when Michael Ignatieff accuses Mishra of ascribing a ‘lofty worldview’ to terrorists (‘a gang of killers’), the comment seems wide of the mark. Mishra ...”

“... a third force in world affairs. Kennan was glad to do so and invited several outsiders, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Oppenheimer, to join him. They concluded that a sovereignty strong enough to calm French fears about Germany and resist what they took to be the threat of Soviet expansion would have to include the British and that the British, to ...”

“... fallibility suited his assessment of human nature. Gradually he grew aware (as his contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr wrote) that ‘the evil in the foe is also in the self.’ This undermined the Manicheanism of the Cold War and underwrote Kennan’s increasingly critical perspective on US policy. Gaddis captures many of his subject’s contradictions, but ...”

“... 1989 emboldened the ‘bland fanatics of Western civilisation’, as the resolutely anti-communist Reinhold Niebuhr called them, ‘who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence’. It wasn’t too difficult for Cold War liberalism, defined and deformed by its ideological battle with ...”

“... the outward-looking, meliorist gospel and the rich internal emphasis derived from the teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr on the presence of social sin. Unlike so many other black ministers, he was prepared to challenge Jim Crow. His future wife, Coretta Scott, had attended the 1948 Progressive Party Convention that nominated Henry Wallace for President (grist ...”