Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. His books include The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism, and American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory. He lives in New York City.
This book is nothing short of stellar, fulfilling its promise to provide an expansive history of this tradition from the assassination of MLK to the present. -Ruben Rosario Rodriguez, Saint Louis University Gary Dorrien is our foremost, most important, and most effective chronicler and interpreter of liberal and liberationist theology. He brings to his task his enormous great erudition, his appetite for data, his sharp critical discernment, and his great moral passion. With this book he completes his trilogy on recent Black theology. More than that, however, this book is state-of-the-art critical assessment of recent Black theology that gives us close-up contact with the players (famous and less famous) who have shaped the enterprise. This book will be important reading for those who want to know how we got here, and who want to know remains to be done in the work of faithful justice. Dorrien has laid down a marker to which careful attention must be paid. -Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary What Gary Dorrien has accomplished in this book of otherworldly learning, insight, and ambition is simply unheard of. Combining deep historical research and knowledge with outstanding analytical clarity and a journalistic voice, this book is simply mesmerizing. -Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism