Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Christian Realism And Augustinian (?) Liberalism, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Surely there is enough kindling lying about in the Bible and in subsequent moral theology to fire up love for neighbors and compassion for countless “friends” in foreign parts--and in crisis. And, surely, the momentum of love’s labor for the just redistribution of resources, fueled by activists’ appeals for solidarity, should be sustained by stressing that we are creatures made for affection, not for aggression. Yet experience, plus the history of the Christian traditions, taught Reinhold Niebuhr, who memorably reminded Christian realists, how often love was “defeated,” how a “strategy of brotherhood . . . degenerates from mutuality to a …