Niebuhr
was one of the
great Christian
theologians of the
twentieth century, though
he saw himself rather as a
cultural and political com-
mentator. He studied theology at
Yale, spent 13 years as a pastor in a
church in Detroit, and became Professor
of Christian Ethics in 1928 at Union Theological
Seminary in New York, where he stayed 'til his retire-
ment in 1960. He died in 1971. One of his foremost achieve-
ments was making Christianity respectable within the 20th
century intellectual community. He was a devastating critic
of other philosphical positions. In one of his best-known
works, The Nature and Destiny of Man, he discusses,
among many other things, the self's transcendence of
its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic
procedure; the two aspects of human nature and
their corresponding sins of excess: pride and
sensuality; the human limitations and
weaknesses of the Christian Church
(or any other group); and the 
fact, as he sees it, that
the enigma of human exist-
ence has no answer
except through
faith and 
hope.