Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

James Carleton Paget and Michael J. Thate (eds.), Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action: A Life in Parts (Syracuse University Press, 2016).

Patti M. Marxsen, Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own (Syracuse University Press, 2015).

Albert Schweitzer is, perhaps, the most truly, and even magnificently, awkward of figures. He was a product of the nineteenth century and in unique ways embodied many of its intellectual and moral achievements and possibilities. Yet he left that age behind and sought to claim a new one, even when he struggled to understand what the twentieth century had brought. Schweitzer was an internationalist who evidently remained entirely confident of the superiority of the culture that had produced him even as he repudiated it. He was a thinker of enduring value, but he founded no school and his very range deprived him of a secure place in conventional academic categories. He was a figure of history but today historians, by and large, overlook him Continue reading →