The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture - Hardcover

Halliwell, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0742508412 ISBN 13: 9780742508415

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005

Synopsis

In this important new work, Martin Halliwell focuses on the tensions between the two dimensions of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought: his political role as a radical social critic and the conservative drift of his religious beliefs. Halliwell concentrates particularly on his attempts to justify the role of the religious critic in a secular age by tracing his thought back to European and American traditions of religious individualism. In order to better examine Niebuhr's philosophy, Halliwell positions him in a series of debates on political, religious, ethical, and cultural themes with other public intellectuals such as John Dewey, Paul Tillich, W. H. Auden, George Kennan, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In doing so, the book reassesses the role of "dialogue" in Reinhold Niebuhr's thought and the important contributions that Reinhold Niebuhr made to twentieth century American culture.

About this title

About the Author

Martin Halliwell is professor of American studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of four previous books: Romantic Science and the Experience of Self, Modernism and Morality, Critical Humanisms, and Images of Idiocy.

Review

This is a searching and open-minded analysis of the most original and influential religious thinker in the American Century. Halliwell shows that Niebuhr's flexible, frequently overextended mind was almost constantly shaped by political and social action. Niebuhr shared the limitations of other engaged leftists and liberals, but often boldly broke away from them. Halliwell nobly resists the temptation to reduce Niebuhr's long, unruly career to a formula or a thesis. He shows Niebuhr's genius as it bounced off and was refracted through a range of thinkers and political actors as broad as American culture. In exploring Niebuhr's dialogues with critics and admirers, Halliwell charts American intellectual life with greater depth than most histories achieve. (David L. Chappell, author of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow)

Martin Halliwell is one of the leading British scholars of modern American culture and, in The Constant Dialogue, he offers a sympathetic but critical analysis of Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian whose sharp angularities of vision have not always elicited sympathy. It is a measure of the book's intelligence and care that the reader is impelled, not only to read Halliwell, but to return to Niebuhr's own texts. (Michael O'Brien, University of Cambridge, author of Conjectures of Order)

Martin Halliwell's book is a thorough and timely examination of one of the most important theologians and political philosophers of our times. It avoids easy conclusions to present Reinhold Niebuhr, and the American society of the 20th century, in all their complexity. (Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham)

At once sympathetic but critical, [Halliwell] presents Niebuhr and American society in all their complexity. (P. L. Urban Jr., Swarthmore College CHOICE)

This is a marvelous book, generous in information, reflection, and the very dialogue that the author believes Reinhold Niebuhr so honored and practiced. Halliwell takes us deeply and valuably into Niebuhr's dialogues with some of the key figures of his long intellectual life. (Journal of American History)

The Constant Dialogue is a remarkable study of the scope of Reinhold Niebuhr's social thought and his intellectual connections to his contemporaries, from William James to James Baldwin. Niebuhr once described realism as the disposition to take all factors in a social and political situation into account. Martin Halliwell's book shows us how that disposition shaped his work and connected him to an extraordinary assembly of other leaders in all aspects of American life. (Robin W. Lovin, Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics Emeritus, Southern Methodist University)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0742508412
• ISBN 13: 9780742508415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384