Source: The Conversation
While James Comey’s most recent clashes with President Trump are foremost on everyone’s minds, he’s had quite a career. He was the U.S. attorney responsible for taking down the New York mafia, the acting U.S. attorney general who stopped the policy that George W. Bush’s administration called “enhanced interrogation” or, in other words, torture, and finally the FBI director who was seen as changing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. His new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” recounts these experiences and many others. He does so not simply to demonstrate his impact on history, but to show what he has learned about ethical leadership and how he has tried to live out that knowledge.
Reviewers have noted the influence of one particular 20th-century American Christian philosopher: Reinhold Niebuhr. Comey wrote his college thesis on Niebuhr. This resonance stayed with him. Until quite recently, Comey used Twitter under the pseudonym “Reinhold Niebuhr”.
I too discovered Niebuhr in college. I’ve studied his works for decades, and my latest book takes up his analysis of our democracy to develop a democratic form of humility.
Understanding Niebuhr can help us, I believe, better understand Comey and the decisions he made.
Categories: America, Ethics, The Muslim Times, USA