Nuclear Weapons and the Conflict of Conscience

191, [1] p. 22 cm. Footnotes. Maps. Reading List. Index of Major Issues Discussed. Substantial pencil underlining noted. Ink notation inside front cover. The Rev. John C. Bennett was a theologian whose views on religion, politics and social policy influenced American thinking for decades. From 1963 to 1970, he served as the 11th president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He also made a lifelong study of Communism and repeatedly warned against turning the cold war into a religious crusade. That was a time in which he was growing increasingly disturbed about American involvement in Southeast Asia, so much so that he and Rabbi Abraham Heschel formed Clergy and Laity Concerned About the Vietnam War. But Mr. Bennett, ordained in the Congregational Church, was never a pacifist-above-all: in 1941, he opposed American isolationism in the face of Nazi conquests and was a co-founder with Reinhold Niebuhr of the magazine Christianity and Crisis. He studied at Williams College and did graduate studies at Oxford University in England and at Union Theological Seminary. He held various religious and teaching posts, joining the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, an interdenominational institution in Morningside Heights, in 1943. He became dean of the faculty in 1955 and was acting president for a brief time before assuming the presidency. In 1970, Mr. Bennett was one of three theologians invited by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify on the war in Southeast Asia. In retirement, he continued to write and lecture and to condemn nuclear warfare. Erich Fromm is one of the contributors: "Erich Seligmann Fromm (March 23, 1900 March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.Fromm's best known work, Escape from Freedom, focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual s true desire. Fromm s critique of the modern political order and capitalist system led him to seek insights from medieval feudalism. In Escape from Freedom, he found favor with the lack of individual freedom, rigid structure, and obligations required on the members of medieval society: What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom But altogether a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those higher in the social hierarchy. Noam Chomsky discusses Erich Fromm's theory of alienation. The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of a humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European public. In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thought (Marx's Concept of Man and Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western and Eastern.…