At Harvard, Martin Doblmeier & Cornel West Discuss Reinhold Niebuhr
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School, and project director Andrew Finstuen discuss Doblmeier's documentary on Reinhold Niebuhr. K. Healan Gaston, Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School moderated the discussion.
"Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Protestant theologian who had extensive influence on political thought and whose criticism of the prevailing theological liberalism of the 1920s significantly affected the intellectual climate within American Protestantism. His exposure, as a pastor in Detroit, to the problems of American industrialism led him to join the Socialist Party for a time. A former pacifist, he actively persuaded Christians to support the war against Hitler and after World War II had considerable influence in the U.S. State Department. His most-prominent theological work was The Nature and Destiny of Man, which was planned as a synthesis of the theology of the Reformation with the insights of the Renaissance."
