In his 2001 book, With the Grain of the Universe, Stanley Hauerwas has made an extended case for Karl Barth as the model for how to do Christian ethics, and for Reinhold Niebuhr as the model for how not to do it. Though Barth's closer and deeper theological connection to the Christian tradition appeals to a Jewish traditionalist by analogy, nevertheless, Niebuhr's approach to social ethics, based as it is on a version of natural law, is of greater appeal. That (...) is because it is more philosophically arguable in a secular society and culture, and because it is more politically effective there. It is what made Niebuhr a more effective opponent of Nazism than was Barth. Also, Niebuhr's version of natural law is not a christianized version of Stoic natural law teaching but, rather, a profound use of the biblical prohibition of idolatry, having heretofore unnoticed affinities with rabbinic developments of that prohibition. (shrink)

A few years ago I found myself at the Ogden, Utah rodeo with thirty schoolteachers from all over the world. They were participants in a Fulbright-supported American studies institute, and the trip to Utah was part of a weeklong foray into a part of America quite different from Amherst, MA, where the bulk of lectures and discussions had taken place in the previous three weeks. Our visit happened to coincide with “Armed Services Day,” and the spectacle my students encountered proved (...) even more impressive than the riding and roping they had expected. The principle feature of that spectacle had to do with the organizers’ almost total confounding of religion and patriotism. At the high point of the event, over the roar of military band music and military helicopters passing overhead, the booming voice of the announcer declared that “God's helicopters” were protecting America and the rest of the world from tyranny. The books under review here endeavor to explain the spectacle in Ogden on that summer day—along with the train of events that, over sixty years ago, launched a crusade against “godless communism” and, a few decades later, made “the Christian right” a major force in American politics. (shrink)

This article has two main divisions, the first consisting in parts 1-3, the second in parts 4-8. The purpose of the first division is to assess Hauerwas's contentions regarding what he takes to be serious debilities in modern theological culture. The objects of Hauerwas's criticism are: (1) natural theology; (2) reason as it is represented in the structure of the modern university and in the "Enlightenment Project"; and (3) liberal Protestantism--the latter particularly as it turns up, by his account, in (...) Reinhold Niebuhr's theology. The article will offer a defense of natural theology and an alternative approach to Niebuhr's theology while showing how Hauerwas's contentions concerning these two matters are mistaken. Parts 4-8 are theological studies. These studies concentrate on selected though main aspects of Hauerwas's outlook. Part 4 concerns a problematic implication of the notion, mainly from Barth, of divinity's humanity; Part 5 a note of difficulty from William James about the idea of the theistic God and its pertinence to the Barthian or Hauerwasian God; Part 6 the relation between belief and witness; Part 7 theology's discourse and analogy; Part 8 the Barthian-Hauerwasian theology as a metaphysics. Part 1, concerning natural theology, stands over both divisions. These observations are not in the main intended as textual studies, though in certain passages the analysis is closely attentive to Hauerwas's text. Also, the paper does not offer the sort of account that would come from a historian, intellectual biographer, or social or cultural analyst or critic. Its focus is philosophical-theological criticism. (shrink)

This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, "A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community" (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that (...) anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism. (shrink)

When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1966, planning to study American intellectual history and perhaps intellectuals specifically, all the talk among the more advanced graduate students was a recently published book, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, by Christopher Lasch. I read it eagerly, but I was not sure what to make of it. The author, Christopher Lasch, offered a very complex analysis of intellectuals’ lives and their social location—or lack of (...) it. It gave as much space to their psychological needs as to their ideas. That seemed to diminish them. Just what did he intend? I wondered. (shrink)

The three books reviewed in this essay, Morality Among Nations: An Evolutionary View , Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age , and Securing Europe , in some sense represent a reaction to Reagan's ideological policies.

In this analysis of Reinhold Niebuhr's 1932 classic Moral Man, Little reviews some of the book's fundamental conclusions. He observes that, when moral language is used in international politics without self-criticism, it diverts attention from the real motives of the statesmen who use it.