Applying Niebuhr’s ideas tough chore for academics
What happens when the contested legacy of America's most famous
20th-century theologian meets the harsh political realities of the 21st?
You end up with questions like whether Reinhold Niebuhr would support
waterboarding.
It's impossible to know what Niebuhr—arguably the
preeminent public intellectual and U.S. theologian from the 1940s to the
1960s—would have said about the practice of torture by the U.S. in
post-9/11 Iraq and Afghanistan.
But such questions are hardly a surprise at a time when everyone from President Obama to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to New York Times columnist David Brooks sees themselves as Niebuhr's acolytes.
