“For all his love of country, Niebuhr never learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. What he did love was that Americans, as a nation, really worried about the bomb. We knew our power, and understood that we were free, and suddenly capable, to exercise it — but never without guilt. The irony of our history was based in knowing our real culpability in becoming a world power, in recognizing that we were far less innocent than our theories of democracy, free-market capitalism, militarism, and evangelicalism assumed…The enemy had the audacity to claim divine purpose. America, said Niebuhr, knew better.” Revealer Books Editor Scott Korb reads Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History and finds a worthy model of Christian realism for the reality-based community.