Courage To Be by Paul Tillich

Read the full post at - Courage To Be by Paul Tillich Sometimes a name shows up everywhere in the same week. That happened to me with Paul Tillich. His name popped up in John Green’s Crash Course Religions on YouTube. Then in The Atlantic. Then in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s excellent Christianity: The First 3,000 Years, where he’s described as one of the most pivotal theologians of the 20th century. Three different sources, totally different contexts, same name. Maybe it’s Baader-Meinhof but that kind of thing gets my attention. So when I found three of his books at my favorite local Atlanta used bookstore for three or four dollars each, I grabbed The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith for a crash course in what this guy was actually about. He’s about a lot. And The Courage to Be is the best entry point. What It’s Actually About The book is short — but genuinely dense. Tillich is wrestling with a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to exist as a self in the modern world,…