Edwin T. Buehrer

From Philosopedia

Buehrer, Edwin Theophil (20th Century)

Buehrer was a Unitarian minister, a humanist who wrote The Art of Being (1971). Earlier, he had written The Changing Climate of Religion (1965).

Martin E. Marty, writing in Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 (Modern American Religion), spoke about Buehrer's strong views:

The rescue of European Jews and the idea of creating refuge for survivors in the United States were only two elements in the drama of war and the about-faces it occasioned. As that drama developed, many pacifists deserted their old cause or if they did not, were scorned by those who did abandon it. Thus Norman Thomas himself looked back on peace movements and came to see how impotent pacifists seemed in wartime. He charged that they "had nothing to offer in the problem of stopping Nazism" except for a religious faith and a moral argument, and these clearly were not enough. A prominent Unitarian minister, Edwin Buehrer, shared Thomas's vision but went on to scold the pacifists. Their voices had become routine, their patterns ritualized. They kept saying "it is Christ's Way, it is the Way of the Cross." Yet behind what they said were "no historical reasons. . . , no empirical reasons, no logical reasons, no practical reasons" in short, no reasons at all.

When Buehrer was the minister of Third Unitarian Church of Chicago, from 1941 to 1969, the membership was close to 250, the Sunday School had more than 100 children, and he served the longest of any minister the church has had.

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