An American Conscience
The Reinhold Niebuhr Story
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Narrated by:
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Alan Taylor
About this listen
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was an inner-city pastor, ethics professor, and author of the famous Serenity Prayer. Time magazine's March 8, 1948, cover story called him "the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards". Cited as an influence by public figures ranging from Billy Graham to Barack Obama, Niebuhr was described by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "the most influential American theologian of the 20th century".
In this companion volume to the forthcoming documentary film by Martin Doblmeier on the life and influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, Jeremy Sabella draws on an unprecedented set of exclusive interviews to explore how Niebuhr continues to compel minds and stir consciences in the 21st century. Interviews with leading voices such as Jimmy Carter, David Brooks, Cornel West, and Stanley Hauerwas as well as with people who knew Niebuhr personally, including his daughter Elisabeth, provide a rich trove of original material to help listeners understand Niebuhr's enduring impact on American life and thought.
©2017 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (P)2017 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing CompanyListeners also enjoyed...
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What Are We Doing Here?
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
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Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
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Strangers in a Strange Land
- Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World
- By: Charles J. Chaput
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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From Charles J. Chaput, author of Living the Catholic Faith and Render unto Caesar, comes Strangers in a Strange Land, a fresh, urgent, and ultimately hopeful treatise on the state of Catholicism and Christianity in the United States. America today is different in kind, not just in degree, from the past. And this new reality is unlikely to be reversed.
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A Must Read
- By CFletcher on 07-04-17
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A Time to Build
- From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
- By: Yuval Levin
- Narrated by: Ford Enlow
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.
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Incisive and Illuminating
- By Jakob on 01-26-23
By: Yuval Levin
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A Thousand Small Sanities
- The Moral Adventure of Liberalism
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.
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Erudite and entertaining!
- By D. A. Vail on 05-20-19
By: Adam Gopnik
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The Givenness of Things
- Essays
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope.
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Mostly thoughts on religious things
- By Adam Shields on 01-26-16
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We Stand Divided
- The Rift Between American Jews and Israel
- By: Daniel Gordis
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Relations between the American Jewish community and Israel are at an all-time nadir. Since Israel’s founding 70 years ago, particularly as memory of the Holocaust and of Israel’s early vulnerability has receded, the divide has grown only wider. Most explanations pin the blame on Israel’s handling of its conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s attitude toward non-Orthodox Judaism, and Israel’s dismissive attitude toward American Jews in general. In short, the cause for the rupture is not what Israel is; it’s what Israel does.
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Jews Will Argue With Each Other
- By Benzion N. Chinn on 09-12-19
By: Daniel Gordis
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Speaking of Faith
- By: Krista Tippett
- Narrated by: Krista Tippett
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating story of her life and conversations, the host of public radio's Speaking of Faith describes her journey of spiritual exploration - a journey shared by countless others.
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Clarity of Faith
- By Charles on 06-01-07
By: Krista Tippett
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Rings of Fire
- Walking in Faith Through a Volcanic Future
- By: Leonard Sweet, Mark Chironna - contributor
- Narrated by: Jon Gauger
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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If you follow the works of best-selling authors Malcolm Gladwell, Faith Popcorn, Daniel Pink, and other trend forecasters, you’ll appreciate learning about over 25 rings of fire that lie ahead for Christians around the world. Len Sweet once again maps the future for the church in this sweeping survey of the 21st century. In the face of eruptive and disruptive culture changes from economics and communications to bioethics and beyond, how do we fight fire with fire, not only catching up to our culture but leading our friends and neighbors toward the feet of Christ?
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A prophetic, food for thought book.
- By SDT on 07-27-22
By: Leonard Sweet, and others
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Things Worth Dying For
- Thoughts on a Life Worth Living
- By: Charles J. Chaput
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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With a balance of wisdom, candor, and scholarly rigor, the beloved archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, traces the human experience from ancient times to today to find threads of connection in our yearning for God, love, honor, beauty, truth, and immortality. He looks at our modern appetite for consumption and individualism and offers a penetrating analysis of how we got here and how we can look to our roots and our faith to find purpose each day amid the noise of competing desires.
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Low score for modernism
- By Joey on 05-17-21
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Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization
- By: Samuel Gregg
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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This sharp commentary on the rise and current decline of Western Civilization touches on historical moments - including the building of early universities in the Middle Ages and the American Revolution - and figures - including Augustine, Acquinas, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith - that exemplify the faith-reason synthesis at the heart of Western Civilization, as well as the modern villains that threaten to destroy it.
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Excellent description of the current state of the West
- By Terryn on 10-24-19
By: Samuel Gregg
What listeners say about An American Conscience
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- Darren Sapp
- 11-27-18
Solid Intro
A solid introduction to this influential theologian. Impeccable research on a man that influenced so many. I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request, and I have voluntarily left this review.
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- zachary nerison
- 03-03-20
Excellent coverage
The content of Niebuhr’s is organized well. Really enjoyed the survey of his writings as life milestones. Perhaps the only improvement could have been a survey of his reception within churches nation wide. In other words, how did his life impact and change the pastoral role.
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- Michael
- 02-06-20
good reading
loved it but it was a little hard to finish. the knowledge was worth every minute.
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- Adam Shields
- 09-19-17
A companion book to the PBS documentary on Reinhol
The past couple of months I keep running across Reinhold Niebuhr. While I read him in seminary, I have not directly read anything by him for several years. But Niebuhr has come back to the world again with modern politics.
The two strong points that Niebuhr makes to our current political and theological world is that systems are always broken. No matter how good the goals or purposes of any institution or organization is, that institution or organization is still made up of sinful humans and will eventually disappoint or harm.
The second related point, that primarily comes out in his Irony of American History, is that in addition to institutions be broken, organizations with good goals will often adopt bad means to accomplish those good goals and in some ways be more dangerous than the institutions that are openly negative. With good intentions, comes the thought that people working within good institutions to cut corners or harm people because of the greater good that accomplishing those good goals will bring.
Those two points keep coming up. So I picked up An American Conscience and then watched the documentary after I finished the book. This is a brief book, not even 200 pages. But it does a good job introducing Niebuhr to readers that were likely not even born when he passed away.
Niebuhr is probably best known as the author of the Serenity Prayer or for being on the cover of Time’s 25th Anniversary edition, or for being Obama, Carter and McCain’s favorite theologian. James Comey wrote his dissertation using Niebuhr as a framework and named his private twitter account after Niebuhr.
The American Conscious book is clearly intended to be a companion to the Documentary (which can be streamed for free and is only 1 hour.) The book goes into much more detail than the documentary and is roughly framed around Niebuhr’s major books. I have only read Moral Man and Immoral Society, the Irony of American History and parts of Nature and Destiny of Man. Moral Man and Immoral Society is a perfect descriptive title. There are two cheap kindle editions available and after I finished An American Conscience I started reading it again.
If you just want an overview of Niebuhr, An American Conscience is a good option. Several years ago I read the The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians. The structure was basically the same for both books. They both primarily concentrated on the books instead of biography. But An American Conscience was far more interesting (and less like an extended book report) than the Armchair Theologians books.
Part of what I like about history is that we should be learning from the past. What I like about Niebuhr is that he seems to take the idea that we should learn from the past seriously. In his case, what he wrote about was inspired by what he experienced. He was a progressive, socialist, pacifist in the 1920s and 30s. Then with the rise of Hitler (Niebuhr was the child of German immigrants and english was his second language) he gave up his pacifism. While touring Europe he gave up his socialism because of the weaknesses of the Russian system. And with the rise of the Cold War he gave up much of his progressivism can called for a much more conservative form of social change.
In someways, Niebuhr is not unlike many young progressives. As they age they understand the weaknesses of some forms of progressivism. But Niebuhr did not give up on the ideals that he originally had. He believed in a gospel that means something for the world today. He believed in many progressive causes, like worker’s rights, civil rights, other social reforms. He understood that sin was more than individual, it was systematic. To address sin as only individual, was to ignore its root causes (this was his main public complaint against Billy Graham.)
Niebuhr throughout his life understood that ethics had to be influenced by faith, not the other way around.
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- Kingsley
- 11-28-18
Detailed life of an american pastor
You probably know Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer, even if you do not know the man:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
If nothing else, this is a great thing that Niebuhr brought to the public consciousness. But there is much more to that man than just this.
'An American Conscience' is a companion to a PBS documentary about Niebuhr. Not having seen the documentary, I feel there are some gaps in this book. But nothing substantial, and the book overall feels comprehensive enough. it doesn't spend much time on his early life, for instance. It really focuses on his ministry.
This book gives a very good overview of his ministry. Focusing strongly on his written works and the events happening around them. It talks about his calling out of Henry ford, when everyone else was thinking Ford was progressive. It talks about his relationship to anti-Hitler German pastor Friedrich Bonhoeffer It talks about his approach to race relations, and his sadness when his previous church changed their stance after he left. It focuses on his presentation of the 'social gospel'. It also discussed how and why his views changed over time, giving a strong justification for that change and why changing views is often a good thing.
It is not theological in content. It is not beating you over the head with Biblical beliefs and teachings. It's a fairly 'secular' approach to giving his story, when compared to many other pastoral biographies I have read.
Narration by Alan Taylor was good. Clean, clear, well paced. enjoyable to listen to.
This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this review voluntarily.
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- Mary V
- 11-23-18
Film Companion Book Recounts Life of Niebuhr
It should be kept in mind that this book is a companion piece to the PBS film of the same name. Otherwise, you will be wondering where the documentation is. I assume the historical luminaries are identified in the film which is the one source for this work.
Reinhold Niebuhr was a brilliant theologian, and first-generation American born of European immigrants.
As a pastor, a speaker, a writer, holding positions of sway at universities and in government both domestic and global, Niebuhr was what one would call today, an influencer. Niebuhr traveled actively spreading his views.
Niebuhr tackled Henry Ford's treatment of his assembly line workers and their pay, the role and responsibility of the US post-WWII, race relations, civil rights, other "social gospel" issues, as well as personal responsibility issues.
Niebuhr was a contemporary of Detrick Bonhoeffer and arranged for him to come to Princeton to study for a year. Niebuhr arranged a second year for Bonhoeffer to spend in America, safely away from Hitler, but Bonhoeffer's conscience wouldn't permit him to and he returned to Germany. As you are probably aware, Bonhoeffer was caught and hung for taking part in a plot to kill Hitler.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn it is Niebuhr who wrote the famous Serenity Prayer, which has become almost synonymous with Alcoholics Anonymous.
Niebuhr suffered a series of strokes in the 1950s which slowed his travel but did not slow the writing of his book.
I heartily recommend this audiobook for anyone interested In the formation of America's social conscience from the 1930s through the 1960s.
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