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Název:		The children of light and the children of darkness :a vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense
Autor:		Niebuhr Reinhold
Rok vydání:		c1972
Identifikátory:		9780023875304 (OCoLC)09458049

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Anotace:	At the end of the summer I finally picked up Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. I say finally because the book had been on my shelf for years. I am not 100 percent sure when I bought my copy (almost exactly like the one pictured to the right); I may have purchased it before moving to Chicago in 1997. The point is that I’ve been carrying it around for years—through five moves, a marriage, more than a few jobs, and three cities—based on the fact that it was written by a prominent, famous author. And I kept it even though I am Catholic and I knew the author was Protestant. I had suspected that Niebuhr had the potential to transcend sectarian differences—to be ecumenical. I bought the book even before I decided to study intellectual history, and was therefore not aware that David Hollinger and Charles Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition source book includes a selection from Children. Upon reading I learned, in short order, that the book is a treatise on Protestant Christian political philosophy. How I had missed the quintessentially Niebuhrian subtitle—“A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense”—after all these years is beyond me. Thanks to my dissertation work I had known, before scrutinizing the table of contents, that Niebuhr was involved, for a time, in the late 1940s effort called “The Committee to Frame a World Constitution” (which produced a book–a preliminary draft of a world constitution). Niebuhr had dropped out, however, due to philosophical differences. Even so, I was still surprised to see that Children would cover “The World Community” in its final chapter. I’m not here, however, to simply relay to you my personal story of delay and surprise in relation to Niebuhr and the book’s contents. I’m here, in fact, writing about the book because it raised my expectations, dramatically, after getting only ten pages or so into it. Niebuhr is deceptively easy reading; he slowly unfolds his philosophical points with a sense of caution and humility, as well as an acumen for the problematic areas of practice (i.e. he’s always on the watch for how humans corrupt good things, especially reason). His one-hand/other-hand thinking appeals to minds who imagine counterpoints quickly after formulating an argument. Niebuhr’s self-dialogue is paradoxically both intellectually comforting and disquieting; you feel like he’s leaving no stone unturned. I was disappointed, then, to perceive some not-so-latent anti-Catholicism in Children. Because I am Catholic, you might argue that I am predisposed to seeing anti-Catholicism, and there may be some truth to that. By reputation, however, I came into the book thinking of Niebuhr as one of the most important theologians of the twentieth-century English-speaking world; I had understood his Protestantism to be a lower-case. I expected ecumenism, and was surprised to find otherwise.
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