Post by Admin on Mar 21, 2024 21:05:37 GMT
A man beyond categories
Paul Tillich was a religious socialist and a profoundly subtle theologian who placed doubt at the centre of his thought
aeon.co/essays/my-grandfather-paul-tillich-the-unbelieving-theologian
My recollections of my grandfather are mostly from childhood visits to my grandparents’ summer cottage in East Hampton in the 1950s and ’60s. The village, with its magnificent Atlantic beaches on the South Shore of Long Island, had already become an intellectual and artistic summer gathering place for European academics, writers and artists displaced by the Second World War. And my grandfather, who had an active social life, counted many of them as friends.
My grandmother, Hannah (or ‘Oma’ as we called her), made it very clear that her husband’s sacred time for writing from 8am to 11am was inviolable, and she protected him from the noise and childish distractions my younger sister and I provided. In the evenings, he would preside over dinner or cocktail parties for friends and acquaintances from the academic and artistic community of what is now called the Hamptons. Occasionally, my grandfather would engage me in a game of chess that, inexplicably, I always lost. I never had the chance to discuss philosophy with him as he died when I was 13, but the conversation at dinner in the Tillich household was rich with ideas, political events and the work of writers and artists I would learn about only much later.
Tillich had been among the first group of professors and the first non-Jewish professor to be dismissed by Hitler for opposing Nazism. The Nazis suppressed his book The Socialist Decision (1933), and consigned it to the flames in Nazi book burnings. In late 1933, he fled Germany with his family to the United States, where he became established as a public intellectual, holding positions as professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary in New York and then as a university professor at Harvard, and finally as professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. During the Second World War, Tillich made radio broadcasts against the Nazi regime for the US State Department and assisted European intellectuals in emigrating to the US. In the 1940s, he served as chairman of the Council for a Democratic Germany. Due to the interest of the magazine magnate Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce, Tillich was featured on the cover of Time magazine in March 1959 and was the featured speaker at Time’s star-studded 40th anniversary gala dinner.
Paul Tillich was a religious socialist and a profoundly subtle theologian who placed doubt at the centre of his thought
aeon.co/essays/my-grandfather-paul-tillich-the-unbelieving-theologian
My recollections of my grandfather are mostly from childhood visits to my grandparents’ summer cottage in East Hampton in the 1950s and ’60s. The village, with its magnificent Atlantic beaches on the South Shore of Long Island, had already become an intellectual and artistic summer gathering place for European academics, writers and artists displaced by the Second World War. And my grandfather, who had an active social life, counted many of them as friends.
My grandmother, Hannah (or ‘Oma’ as we called her), made it very clear that her husband’s sacred time for writing from 8am to 11am was inviolable, and she protected him from the noise and childish distractions my younger sister and I provided. In the evenings, he would preside over dinner or cocktail parties for friends and acquaintances from the academic and artistic community of what is now called the Hamptons. Occasionally, my grandfather would engage me in a game of chess that, inexplicably, I always lost. I never had the chance to discuss philosophy with him as he died when I was 13, but the conversation at dinner in the Tillich household was rich with ideas, political events and the work of writers and artists I would learn about only much later.
Tillich had been among the first group of professors and the first non-Jewish professor to be dismissed by Hitler for opposing Nazism. The Nazis suppressed his book The Socialist Decision (1933), and consigned it to the flames in Nazi book burnings. In late 1933, he fled Germany with his family to the United States, where he became established as a public intellectual, holding positions as professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary in New York and then as a university professor at Harvard, and finally as professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. During the Second World War, Tillich made radio broadcasts against the Nazi regime for the US State Department and assisted European intellectuals in emigrating to the US. In the 1940s, he served as chairman of the Council for a Democratic Germany. Due to the interest of the magazine magnate Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce, Tillich was featured on the cover of Time magazine in March 1959 and was the featured speaker at Time’s star-studded 40th anniversary gala dinner.