Writing a few Spines back about David Brooks and Barack Obama, I commented on their interchange in re Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Christian and democratic realist. And, then, swept by a rush of intellectual nostalgia I headed for my "big thinker" shelves. To the right, two books of his brother, H. Richard, and, then, dozens of books by and on Nietzsche. To the left, Thomas Nagel and John U. Nef. I have more books about Niebuhr than by him. But I don't recall reading any of them. My memory suggests that I've read all of the books by him in my study; my notes in the margins, my (pretentious) arguments with him, my underlining of what I thought especially significant points, all of these confirm my basic recollection. Still, much of the content of these volumes had vanished from my mind. Yet much of it does not. A balance between the two is not bad after more than a quarter century. I've spent the last hour just breezing through the books at hand. Many pieces of wisdom cry out from the pages. Here is one: "The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will." Or another, from the same book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: "Racial prejudice is indeed a form of irrationality; but it is not as capricious as modern universalists assume. Racial prejudice, the contempt of the other group, is an inevitable concomitant of racial pride: and racial pride is an inevitable concomitant of the ethnic will to live." Not bad. If you are interested as I am in the bonds and tensions between Jews and Christians, you might want to read his essay, "The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization," in his book, Pious and Secular America. As I am quoting him, he had a knack for the telling quotation himself. Here is a citation to John Cotton from Niebuhr's essay, "Innocent Nation, Innocent World," from The Irony of American History: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will...And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak great blasphemies."