The Civil Rights Movement. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The assassination of a president and a senator, both from the same family. Praise turns into protest; hope into disenchantment, as democracy's new day goes up in flames. The 1960s was an era born in hope and ends in deep conflict.

During this era, Reinhold Niebuhr, once dubbed "America's theologian," retires from Union Seminary in New York. Though little has been published about him in this decade, much of Niebuhr's life and work are as much shaped and transformed by this era as his work shapes and transforms the discourse in theology, ethics, and the politics of the age.

Ronald Stone, a former student-turned-colleague of Niebuhr, brilliantly introduces readers to the Niebuhr of the 1960s. In his analysis of Niebuhr, he shows a theologian whose work sometimes turns less theological and becomes more secular in his writing with a view toward speaking to the secular world around him.