THE NEW MAN FOR OUR TIME

The author addresses the question of ""how to remain contemporary"" and offers three characteristics in reply: compassion, reverence, and intellectual integrity. He is concerned over the tendency toward polarization in our society with respect to issues such as the Protestant Ethic, the New Morality, the Social Gospel, Piety versus Activism, and similar matters. But in spite of his apparent familiarity with these issues, his treatment both of them and of the solutions he proposes suffers from oversimplification, and the positions he espouses and the examples he gives offer little more than a restatement of ideas and programs he has set out in earlier writings. It seems unlikely, for example, that the Colonial Quaker, John Woolman, can serve as a substantial model for contemporary man; and there is grave doubt whether the models of the inner life, appropriate for earlier generations, will satisfy the need of today. The result is a book that a decade or two ago might have found an eager readership but reading now sounds nostalgic and irrelevant.