The blog "Faithful Citizenship" has a very good conversation with Timothy Beach-Verhey on the continuing importance of H. Richard Niebuhr. Tim's recent book, Robust Liberalism: H. Richard Niebuhr and the Ethics of American Public Life was recently published by Baylor University Press. Here's a snippet of the interview:
Liberalism has a much richer and more varied history than much of the present discourse suggests. It is neither simply the product of the Enlightenment nor necessarily bound to anti-religious secularism and self-interested individualism. So, part of what I want to do is rehabilitate liberalism by describing a theologically and socially robust alternative to the secular, individualistic form it so often takes in current social and theological discourse. H. Richard Niebuhr provided me with a perfect exemplar of this position. So, I put his more theologically profound and historically nuanced version of liberalism in conversation with both critics and defenders of contemporary liberalism, showing that the debate in most social and religious circles is stunted and inadequate.