Paul Tillich: Intimacy with Nature, existentialism and Paul Tillich, the Realm of Existentialism at DividingLine.com

Born in Starzeddel, a village in the province of Brandenburg, Paul Tillich spent his boyhood years in Schönfliess, a small community east of the Elbe, where his father served as minister and diocesan superintendent in the Prussian Territorial Church. Life in Schönfliess—a walled town founded in the Middle Ages and surrounded by fertile fields and dark forests—left indelible marks on the impressionable boy: a strong sense of historical continuity, a feeling of intimacy with nature and its processes, and a deep attachment to the church as the bearer of sacred meaning in the centre of community life.

This life-style, epitomized for Tillich in the person of his authoritarian and theologically conservative father, was challenged when Tillich first attended the humanistic secondary school in Königsberg-Neumark, where he was introduced to the classical ideal of free thought, untrammelled by anything except the rules of reason. He accepted that ideal enthusiastically. When his father was transferred to Berlin in 1900, he responded with the same enthusiasm to the kind of freedom that life in a thriving metropolis made possible. --Copyright © Encyclopædia Britannica