People 

Reinhold Niebuhr - 1892-1971 -  United States

Encyclopedia Entries

Wikipedia

Columbia Encyclopedia

Questions of 

Reading

• Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics (1932)
• Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of Tragedy (1937) 
• The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941) 
• Faith and History (1949) 
• The Irony of American History (1952) 
• Christian Realism and Political Problems (1953) 
• Pious and Secular America (1958) 
• The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959) 
• The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1974) 
• The Self and the Dramas of History 

Writing Available on the Internet

Commentary

Dictionary of Modern Western Theology

See biographies by R. H. Stone (1972) and R. Fox (1987); studies by H. P. Odegard (1956, repr. 1972), J. Bingham (1961, repr. 1972), N. A. Scott, Jr., ed. (1975); bibliography by D. B. Robertson (1984).

Quotations

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

The final test of religious faith is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.