…seeing these responses through a Niebuhrian lens challenges me to acknowledge these actions for what they are—reactions to anxiety—and to confront what it is that I am actually afraid of and trying to avoid—facing the fragility of life and love.
The recent cheating scandal in college admissions underscores the anxiety even the wealthiest, most famous parents feel about their children’s future – an anxiety aptly described and predicted by Reinhold Niebuhr, among other mid-twentieth-century theologians, and one whose effects we can and should mitigate by political means.
It seems that only a certain kind of public theologian, touting a certain kind of theology, is recognizable to the religiously unaffiliated as being, well, religious.
Paul contrasts the children of light with the children of the darkness. This contrast is particularly manifest in the war that we fight and the weapons with which we do so.
