[Dialogue] More on my Niebuhr class

[Tim Wegner]

I got some interesting correspondence about my Reinhold Neibuhr 
class, so I thought I'd post a bit more about it. The following is an 
excerpt of a note I sent to Wendell St. John.

In any case, I don't have any materials to share, but I can tell you 
what I did.

I downloaded a video of a panel discussion held earlier this year at 
Georgetown University featuring Krista Tippett, E. J. Dionne, and 
David Brooks. The file is large, about a gigabyte, and takes a while 
to download. I converted it to a DVD. Then I recruited two people in 
the church who were knowledgeable about Niebuhr. I had them comment 
on the same issues that Brooks, Tippett, and Dionne were discussing, 
as a kind of extension of the Georgetown even panel. We the broadened 
the discussion to the whole group.

I did that for two different Sundays, a total of 45 minutes each. 
There is way more material in the video than can be used in two 
sessions. The first session dealt more with Niehbur's theology, and 
the second more how a Niebuhrian approach plays out (or doesn't) in 
Obama's policies.

The underlying themes of the two sessions were:

1. Niebuhr believes that humans must stand in the tension between the 
ethical manadate to respond to suffering and injustice, on one hand, 
and, and the danger of failing because of our own hubris and our 
ignorance of our own tragic weaknesses. (The very last word in "The 
Irony of American History" is "vainglory".)

2. Policies flow out of a view of human nature. If your view is that 
humans are basically innocent, and corrupted by society, you will 
form one set of policies. If you believe that human nature contains 
both heroic qualities along with tragic flaws, another, different set 
of policies flow. Brooks and Dionne both argued that Obama (like 
Lincoln) belonged to the second group.

 My preparation consisted of watching the video, thinking  about it, 
and selecting themes, and locating portions of the video to show. 
Leading the session was relatively simple, and the result was well 
received.

The link to the appropriate Speaking of Faith page is:

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/obamas-
theologian/

The video itself (as I said, a very large download, took me overnight 
with my slowish DSL) is:

http://download.publicradio.org/video/speakingoffaith/20090212_obamas-
theologian_video-event720.mov

This is a quicktime file. Needs some special software to convert to a 
DVD, but you can watch it on a computer directly.

You can watch it in lower resolution directly over the internet on 
your computer here:

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/obamas-
theologian/video-brooksdionne.shtml#slideshow

Tim