Considered one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century, James's influential book seeks to shift the emphasis in the study of religion and psychology from the dogmas and external forms of religion to the unique mental states associated with it.

This notable and influential study of the psychology of religion asserts that instead of the tenants of organized religion, we should look to the individual religious experiences as the foundations of religious life. As such, James makes his case with the religious accounts of various well-known thinkers throughout history,...

Does Civilization Need Religion? sets out from the fact that religion's inability to make its ethical and social resources available for the solution of the moral problems of modern civilization is one, and the neglected one, of the two chief causes responsible for its debilitated condition. It is convinced that if Christian idealists are to make religion socially effective they will be forced to detach themselves from the dominant secular desires of the nations as well as from the greed of economic groups. It aims to show that though neither the orthodox nor the modern wing of the Christian...

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), ethicist, theologian, and political philosopher, taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City from 1928 to 1960. Prior to that, he was minister of Detroit's Bethel Evangelical Church for thirteen years. Among his many books are 'Faith and History', 'Pious and Secular America', 'Beyond Tragedy' and 'The Irony of American History'.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr's book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended. Most proponents of democracy, Niebuhr claimed, were "children of light," who had optimistic but naive ideas about how society could...

Description:
This book centers on the major theme of Reinhold Niebuhrs lifework, the nature of humanity and the political and social life. Idealistic and realistic social philosophies are reevaluated and tribalism is analyzed as a pervasive quality of humankinds societies. A thinker who has always advanced by criticizing his own assumptions, Dr. Niebuhr continued to break new ground and to reconsider some of his earlier judgments.

In this book, Dr. Niebuhr reviews the doctrines of the political order advanced by religious and secular interests; he traces the long history of the paradox of...

This addition to Westminster John Knox Press's Library of Theological Ethics series brings one of Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works back into print. This 1935 book answered some of the theological questions raised by Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and articulated for the first time Niebuhr's theological position on many issues. The introduction by ethicist Edmund N. Santurri sets the work into historical and theological context and also assesses the viability of some of Niebuhr's positions for theology and ethics today.