The Niebuhr Society

Reinhold Niebuhr: Justice and the Death Penalty

The New Republic has another Reinhold Niebuhr essay from the 1950s available on their site. This one is Niebuhr's reflection on justice and the death penalty. Excerpt:

While this exhaustive analysis of the whole problem of capital punishment achieves its interest primarily because of the light it throws upon one of the most curious ironies of Anglo-Saxon justice, it should have the additional attraction to American readers, that it may sensitize their conscience in regard to a moral problem in which our nation has adapted the standards of the “mother” country without realizing that these standards were the dubious by-products of a great legal tradition.

Tim Beach-Verhey on H. Richard Niebuhr

The blog "Faithful Citizenship" has a very good conversation with Timothy Beach-Verhey on the continuing importance of H. Richard Niebuhr. Tim's recent book, Robust Liberalism: H. Richard Niebuhr and the Ethics of American Public Life was recently published by Baylor University Press. Here's a snippet of the interview:

Liberalism has a much richer and more varied history than much of the present discourse suggests. It is neither simply the product of the Enlightenment nor necessarily bound to anti-religious secularism and self-interested individualism. So, part of what I want to do is rehabilitate liberalism by describing a theologically and socially robust alternative to the secular, individualistic form it so often takes in current social and theological discourse. H. Richard Niebuhr provided me with a perfect exemplar of this position. So, I put his more theologically profound and historically nuanced version of liberalism in conversation with both critics and defenders of contemporary liberalism, showing that the debate in most social and religious circles is stunted and inadequate.