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This thesis comprises a re-evaluation of the feminist theological critique, as given by Valerie Saiving, Judith Plaskow, Daphne Hampson and Susan Nelson Dunfee, of Reinhold Niebuhr's doctrine of sin. The re-evaluation proceeds from a contextual interpretation of Niebuhr's theology in general and a contextual reading of his doctrine of sin in particular. My argument is that Niebuhr is deliberately and consistently a contextual theologian. I locate his contextual methodology in the open-ended approach of Christian realism. / The feminist critique is based on the assumption that Niebuhr universally defines the primary sin as pride. It is argued that pride is in fact a distinctly male characteristic, and, while quite plausibly the primary sin for men, is clearly not the primary sin for women. Niebuhr is guilty, that is, of confusing male reality with human reality in the doctrine. Saiving and Plaskow then develop a definition of women's sin which they correspond with Niebuhr's sin of sensuality. This type of sin, rather than being self-aggrandizing, is characterized by inordinate and destructive self-effacement. Their subsidiary argument is that Niebuhr erroneously treats sensuality, which should be equal but opposite to pride, as a secondary form of sin. / My argument in this thesis is that the critique rests on a mistaken assumption about the universality of Niebuhr's claim. His concerns were with the powerful. The contextual claim that pride is the primary form of sin in those who are empowered is being mistaken for a claim that pride is the primary sin for all people, regardless of gender or context. My subsidiary argument is that the correlation of women's sin with Niebuhr's understanding of sensuality is mistaken. What the feminists refer to as women's sin is in fact not sin at all for Niebuhr but evidence of injustice. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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Zugl.: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2010

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago Divinity School, March 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Liberalism is often criticized as too moralistic and removed from the realities of politics; and too complacently accepting of injustices. Such criticisms, familiar among contemporary political theorists, were expressed far more forcefully in the earlier twentieth century. Liberalism then came under attack from anti-liberals who wholly rejected the institutional and ethical limits on the political deployment of violence and fear insisted upon by liberals. Such anti-liberals advanced arguments for political ruthlessness on behalf of a truer morality - either the morality of pursuing morally imperative political goals; or the morality of "realistically" responding to threats to public order. Liberals found themselves faced with a dilemma: to adhere to their principles at the price of hampering their ability to combat both existing injustices, and the threat posed by ruthless anti-liberal movements; or to abandon their scruples in seeking to defend, or transform, liberal society. The criticisms and challenges confronting liberalism between the end of World War I, and the end of the Cold War, thus centered on opposing responses to problems of political ethics. They were also shaped by opposed ideals of political ethos - the "spirit", dispositions of character, sensibility and patterns of perception and response, which characterize the way in which actors pursue their values and goals in practice. In this dissertation I reconstruct these debates, and explicate the ethical claims and questions involved, presenting accounts of the opposed - yet often convergent - positions of moral purism, end-maximalism, and realism. I offer accounts of the ethical arguments and ethos of such anti-liberals as Lenin, Trotsky, and Lukacs; and explore the ambivalent commitments and ambiguous arguments of Max Weber, who influenced both critics and defenders of liberalism. Finally, and primarily, I reconstruct the ethical arguments and ethos of "tempered liberalism" - a strain of liberalism, represented by Reinhold Niebuhr, Isaiah Berlin, and Adam Michnik, which sought to re-imagine liberalism as an ethos which rejected both the innocence and complacency of some earlier liberalisms, and the ruthlessness of anti-liberalism, and steered a "moderate" ethical path between hard-headed, skeptical realism, and values of individual integrity and idealism. / Government

This thesis is based on eleven Storm and Stress dramas of Lenz and Kllnger. It discusses extensively the lack of freedom of their Storm and Stress characters in the society of the day, as seen in the dramas, and also examines these characters' search for freedom and the meaning they attribute to freedom. In addition, this investigation attempts to establish a concept of ultimate freedom and to show that some "Stürmer und Dränger" possess it and are thereby able to carry out their mission of social improvement while finding individual happiness and fulfillment. The term "Stürmer und Dränger" is used throughout the thesis to mean only the Storm and Stress characters in the plays discussed and does not refer to the writers of this period. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

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