Reinhold Niebuhr: The Ideal Christian Realist

The trouble with realism is that it’s so unrealistic. Certainly that’s true of realism as a low-rent metaphysics or epistemology, but it’s true even of the word’s most common usages, as a description of a certain kind of foreign policy and a certain kind of political governance. A dark mirror of idealism, realism would have us ignore half of history, half of human motivation, and half of politics. Half of theology, for that matter. Read Full Article »