Search Results for: Scott Korb

“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. Continue Reading →

Scott Korb: They are not running away. They are not rebelling. They may not actually know, or be able to articulate, what they believe, but almost every one of them — ninety-seven per cent — believes in God. The vast majority of them — like the vast majority of us — are Christians. Very few are what might be called spiritual seekers; hardly any of them know what it means to say (or be) “spiritual but not religious.” When prompted, nearly all of them speak positively about religion, yet with each other they hardly ever talk — much less argue — about it at all. They are conventional and, according to Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, they “may actually serve as a very accurate barometer of the condition of the culture and institutions of our larger society. Far from being alien creatures from another planet, American teenagers actually well reflect back to us the best and worst of our own adult condition and culture.” Continue Reading →