Bo Peery
Ph.D. Student
I am a PhD student who came to GW in the fall of 2003 to pursue an interest in recent U.S. political history. During my first semester here, while in Professor Ribuffo's U.S. Social Thought seminar, I developed an interest in intellectual history after encountering the thought of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. I have spent the last few years trying to learn everything I can about Niebuhr and the Christian realism with which he is most often associated. My dissertation will examine three of Niebuhr's cohorts-John Coleman Bennett, Liston Pope, and Robert McAfee Brown-in order to develop a fuller understanding of Christian realism. While many historians treat Niebuhr's realism as a rejection of the reform-oriented Social Gospel that preceded it, I argue that Christian realism actually provides continuity between the Social Gospel and the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.