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010 _a27025558
040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _aen
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aBR
100 1 _aNiebuhr, Reinhold,
_d1892-1971
245 1 0 _aDoes civilization need religion?
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _aRelease date is 2025-10-13
508 _aSean/IB@DP
520 _a"Does civilization need religion? : A study in the social resources and…." by Reinhold Niebuhr is a treatise on religion and society written in the early 20th century. It examines whether and how religion can sustain personality, supply moral energy, and guide social life in a mechanized, secular age shaped by science and industrialism. The work argues that religion’s metaphysical plausibility and its social efficacy are both under pressure, yet it may still offer indispensable resources for ethical reconstruction. The opening of the treatise diagnoses religion’s waning influence in modern urban-industrial life, noting that science challenges a personalized universe while impersonal economic systems corrode respect for persons. It contrasts frantic orthodoxy and accommodating liberalism, arguing that the urgent crisis is not intellectual alone but moral: religion’s failure to make civilization ethical alienates especially the working classes. The author then sketches religion’s positive resources—reverence for personality, the courage to love and forgive beyond what reason alone sustains, humility before absolute standards, and a motive stronger than determinist cynicism—for building a just society. He critiques middle-class and urban forms of faith for private rectitude without social imagination, and traces how historic compromises made religion conservative (e.g., Protestantism’s ties to nationalism and commerce) while Catholicism at times exerted stricter social ethics. Finally, he contrasts medieval monastic rigor, Catholic economic restraints, and papal universalism with Protestant secularization and Puritan discipline, showing how virtues of industry and thrift slid into sanctified wealth and power, narrowing love of neighbor and oversimplifying ethics at the very point where modern society most needs depth. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cNew York: The Macmillan Company, 1927
653 _aPhilosophy and religion
653 _aChristianity
653 _aChristian civilization
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/doescivilization0000rein/page/n5/mode/2up
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77050
999 _c117774
_d117774