Reinhold Niebuhr

Wishful Thinking Idealism, unlike Christian Realism, believes that everyone, even competition, is fundamentally reasonable.

if the flooding of the frontlines by unprepared new recruits results in exorbitant Russian casualties, the true effect may be to make Russia’s armed forces look weaker than ever.

Niebuhr realized that an overweening faith in the powers of human rationality was a severely misplaced and perpetual threat which has reemerged in 2022 America. 

The economic aid which is required could not be a matter of pure generosity. Nations as nations are incapable of such generosity.

From 1945 to 1947 as the United States and Soviet Union moved toward the Cold War, Christian realists writing for Reinhold Niebuhr’s journal, Christianity and Crisis, responded to global dilemmas. Here are five impressions of those articles, along with lessons for today.

After traveling through Europe in 1947—including to Scotland, Amsterdam, and Switzerland—Reinhold Niebuhr wrote some reflections, including on state churches, the Truman Doctrine, Christian political parties, and more.

At the end of Reinhold Niebuhr’s travels across Western Europe in 1947, he spent a week at the Ecumenical Institute, a facility near Geneva. He was hopeful of how this project would bless the church life of the world, and he offered observations about discussions there about communism, church-state relations, Christian political parties, and more.

In the Free World’s multifaceted response to Putin’s war, a blueprint for a global alliance of democracies is emerging.

After visiting Scotland, Reinhold Niebuhr traveled to the Netherlands and offered another correspondence that the journal published in April 1947.