American social ethicist and theologian
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6 episodes with Gary Dorrien
6 episodes with Gary Dorrien
3 episodes with Gary Dorrien
4 episodes with Gary Dorrien
2 episodes with Gary Dorrien
2 episodes with Gary Dorrien
2 episodes with Gary Dorrien
4 episodes with Gary Dorrien
3 episodes with Gary Dorrien
Some conversations want to be in a coffee shop, not a studio — and this is one of them. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty and I share a particular endangered species of Baptist heritage, the small, ecumenical, justice-formed wing whose patron saints include her father, Glenn Hinson, the Baptist church historian who taught half my div-school professors how to take the contemplative tradition seriously. So before we got anywhere near the politics of freedom, the problem of wealth, or the murderus super chickens of late-stage neoliberalism, we sat in her father's legacy for a while. The conversation took a different shape because of it. What follows is a slow take — on the perversion of freedom in white Christian America, the way our politics has lost any room for loss or failure, and what theological education has to do now if it is going to do anything at all. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty is the J. Roy Davis Family Chair of Theology and History at Union Presbyterian Seminary's Charlotte campus, where she teaches theology and ethics. Ordained in the PC(USA), she previously taught for nearly two decades at Bellarmine University, and earned her PhD from what is now UPSem. The books that anchor this conversation: Authentic Christian Freedom: Deconstructing the American Gospel of Liberty (the newest, on freedom's misuse in white Christian America); The Problem of Wealth: A Christian Response to a Culture of Affluence (Orbis, 2017 — winner of the Catholic Press Association's first-place prize in Catholic Social Teaching); and Dutiful Love: Empowering Individuals and Families Affected by Serious Mental Illness. Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The volume of "I genuinely don't know what to preach anymore" emails landing from clergy has become its own data set. Pastors are not okay. So I did the only honest thing — I outsourced your questions to the one person whose books, research, and classroom hours have been training people for exactly this moment. Leah Schade is back on Homebrewed, and she has spent the better part of a decade surveying thousands of preachers about what it actually costs to stand up on Sunday and tell the truth. We talked about fear, the unity trap, the cut-flower problem in progressive preaching, the assessment tool that turns courage into context, and the very specific reasons your sermon last week left your stomach in knots. This is the conversation I would want sitting next to me on a Saturday night when the sermon will not come and the news will not stop. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade is Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary. Her newest book, Preaching and Social Issues: Tools and Tactics for Empowering Your Prophetic Voice, is the practical, aggressively pragmatic follow-up to her 2019 Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide. Previous Podcast Visits Include: Faith During an Ecological Collapse and Preaching in a time of Crisis from Corona to Climate Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gary Dorrien joins me and Aaron to close out six weeks of Theology for Troublemakers with a session that covered more ground than any before it — Kelly Brown Douglas as the fourth womanist founder, the double negative she cut from Resurrection Hope that contains the argument she's still wrestling with, Raphael Warnock as the student James Cone staked his hopes for Black theology on, the last conversation Gary had with Cone before he died, and forty unsparing minutes on Niebuhr's Zionism that ended where Gary needed it to end: Palestinian children are every bit as precious as Israeli children and no less deserving of a decent future. If you want the lectures, the readings, the supplemental interviews, and the discussion guides, head to www.HomebrewedClasses.com. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom Social Ethics for This Moment What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology The Future of Faith & Justice Theology for Action The Sacred, The Political, and Why We're All Vulnerable Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Most weeks now I get an email from someone who's sure they've believed a lie their whole life — that the faith holding their family, their friendships, their sense of self together is collapsing, and they don't know who they are without it. I've been that person more than once. So in this essay I want to say the thing I wish someone had said to me: what's dying might not be your faith. It might just be your idea of what your faith was. Drawing on Whitehead's four stages of religion — ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization — I make the case that belief-centered Christianity is a late, late development, maybe 200 years old in its current intensity, not 2,000. For most of human history religion was bodies moving together, food shared, the dead remembered. The relationship was never in the certainty. It was always in the meal. If you're in the panic right now, this one's for you. Pull up a chair. If this conversation is interesting, then come join me and Ilia Delio for our upcoming class, The Future of Religion, where we will digging in to the evolution of religion, its current belief centered crisis, and the possibilities on the horizon. This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Week five of Theology for Troublemakers, and we finally got to James Cone — which meant we got to Charlene Sinclair, and I want you to know that the moment Gary introduced her on this call was one of the more moving things we've done in this class. He described her as the student who told Cone she saw something in his early work that nobody else gets — the importance of Fanon to his concept of ontological Blackness — and the way he described the day she defended her dissertation, how he held his one point until the very end so he could announce that this dissertation had explained, like no book ever written, what Fanon actually meant to Cone's thought, tells you everything about who James Cone was as a teacher and who Charlene Sinclair is as a scholar. We started at the beginning: the three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power — the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning, and the assassination of King — and why Cone said bottled rage would have killed him if he hadn't written that book. Gary walked us through the satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim versus a racial one, what ontological Blackness actually meant, and why Cone's sweeping indictment of the Negro church before 1968 was, as Gary put it, seriously flawed even as it produced a towering theology. We got into the womanist challenge — Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing there is nothing redeeming in the cross — and why Cone couldn't start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until Delores retired and Emily Towns went to Yale; he needed just enough personal distance to think it through. Then Charlene took us somewhere unexpected on Niebuhr: she asked, quietly, whether there wasn't a personal parallel between the Niebuhr brothers and the Cone brothers — Richard the better theologian, Reinhold the extravert who needed the crowd — and Gary spun it out for ten minutes in a way that you could tell he had been sitting with for years and had never said in public. We ended with Caleb's question about what it means for white Christians to actually hear the cry of Black blood, and Charlene answered it by describing her teenage grandson trembling in her arms, his whole body shaking, saying he didn't want to die. That's where the class ended. That's where James Cone's theology begins. If you haven't joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary's full lecture series, Aaron's supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Last session is next week — social ethics, full circle. And come to Theology Beer Camp, where Gary, Arron, and Cornel West will all be in the same room. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Andy Root is back, and this time he's got a fertility god on the cover of his book — which, if you've been paying any attention to his work, is not actually a detour. Baal and the Gods of More is what happens when Andy takes the background hum of economic critique that's been running through all his previous books and turns it all the way up, then runs it through First and Second Kings, Hartmut Rosa's theory of dynamic stabilization, Robert Gordon's economic history of the American special century, and Luther's commentary on the Magnificat, and comes out the other side with something genuinely uncomfortable and genuinely useful. The argument in brief: the church's anxiety about decline is not primarily a spiritual problem or a missional problem. It is a fertility cult problem. We have, like the Israelites under the Omride dynasty, decided that Yahweh needs a little help from the gods of growth — and we've done it so thoroughly that we can barely tell the difference anymore between faithful ministry and escalatory capital accumulation. Andy doesn't spare himself, or Tripp, or the emerging church movement, or the academic publishing world, or anyone who has ever refreshed their social media numbers and felt something. The conversation got real fast and stayed there. And yes, there is a Counting Crows footnote. Also: Tripp and Andy are going back to Bonhoeffer's house in Berlin in summer 2027 — two different tracks, one for personal and vocational formation, one for the theology nerds who want to read Bonhoeffer intensely and argue about it in his actual house. Go to BonhoefferTrip.com to get on the list to get info and early access to tickets. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. Previous podcast visits with Andy include: Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can't Control with Diana Butler Bass & Andy and Kara Root Incarnation as Resistance Life Together in Turmoil & Bonhoeffer's Experiment in Community Resonance in an Accelerated Age Secular Mysticism & Identity Politics the Church after Innovation Churches and the Crisis of Decline Acceleration, Resonance, & the Counting Crows Ministry in a Secular Age Christopraxis with Andy Root Faith Formation in a Secular Age the Promise of Despair Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A year ago I started binge-watching shows during workouts and didn't notice when it became a problem. Then a new season dropped, I finished it in 48 hours, and I sat in front of the screen feeling a specific blankness — that sensation of having consumed something and received nothing. This essay is about that feeling. Not screen time. Not the hours. The architecture beneath them, and what it is doing to our capacity for depth. This is the first in a short series of essays in conversation with the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose book The Disappearance of Rituals I cannot stop thinking about. Han names what most of our cultural commentary cannot quite reach: the loss of the forms that once let experience accumulate into meaning. Over the next several essays I'll put his diagnosis to work on the actual texture of our lives — our screens, our feeds, our worship, our politics, our relationships. Here is the question this one leaves you with: what have we quietly trained ourselves out of? This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rolf Jacobson is back — psalm scholar, dean at Luther Seminary, co-author of the Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the Old Testament, and one of my favorite people to argue theology with over a long dinner. His new book God Meets Us in Our Suffering is unlike anything else he's written, and unlike almost anything else I've read on the subject. It's the story of three close friends — Rolf, his brother Carl, and their friend Mike Pancoast — who all had cancer, went through it together, and wrote about it side by side by side. Rolf had bone cancer at fifteen, lost both legs, and has been in a wheelchair for forty-five years. Carl was diagnosed with leukemia in 2022, declared cancer free in 2024, then died months later when meningitis attacked his brain after the bone marrow transplant compromised his immune system. Mike had lymphoma. What the three of them discovered in writing the book — and what Rolf and I spent this conversation unpacking — is that they didn't know they were writing a book about the theology of the cross. They thought they were just telling their stories. They weren't. This is one of the most honest, funny, theologically rich conversations I've had on this podcast, and it's also one of the most personal. Rolf doesn't let suffering become an abstraction. It never was one for him. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who's read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn't quite fit anymore. Together they'll trace religion's evolutionary arc and map what's emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you're able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gary Dorrien came to organizing the hard way — canvassing for McGovern in Alma, Michigan in 1972, where people didn't just oppose the candidate, they despised him, and where two doorstep encounters came close enough to violence that he learned the hard way to pair up. He didn't come out of that thinking he'd found his calling. What he found instead was Michael Harrington at a Harvard Divinity School lecture two years later — corduroy jacket, blue work shirt, gently correcting his own introduction — and joined DSOC on the spot. This week's session gave us Gary's full origin story as an organizer: from the McGovern campaign to the Albany years where he co-founded a DSOC chapter, led Central American solidarity work through C-SPACE, and discovered firsthand the cultural chasm between two wings of the left that could barely stand to share a building. Then Aaron took over and introduced three extraordinary guests — Joe Strife,Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Carolyn Baker — who brought the history of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Beulah Sanders, and the General Baker Institute directly into the room, and turned the question of who should lead into a live theological reckoning. Carolyn did the interview sitting on her mother's childhood porch steps in Dallas, recording oral history from a woman who is still organizing through dementia, which tells you everything you need to know about where this tradition lives and who carries it. If you haven't joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary's full lecture series, Aaron's supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Next week: James Cone with Charlene Sinclair. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom Social Ethics for This Moment What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology The Future of Faith & Justice Theology for Action The Sacred, The Political, and Why We're All Vulnerable Come keep thinking with us — Theology Beer Camp 2026 This is exactly what we will be sitting with at Theology Beer Camp this October 8–10 in Kansas City. Our theme this year is the God-podcalypse. Cornell West is coming. So are a lot of your favorite theologians and podcasters and six hundred of your soon-to-be-favorite people. We are going to think together about what it means to be a people of faith in catastrophic times — without deodorizing the catastrophe, and without giving despair the last word. Don't wait. → TheologyBeer.Camp JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Miroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged over years of friendship that moves from the problem of religious language to the hiddenness of God to what it means to trust without being able to specify what you're trusting toward. It's one of the more unusual and quietly devastating books I've read in a while, and the conversation was every bit as good. In it we discuss... The origin of their friendship and the letter exchange that became Glimmerings Why big words like faith, grace, and redemption slip free from meaning — and why that's a theological problem, not just a poetic one Attention, divine agency, and the debate between active receptivity and God's ontological priority Christian writing letters from a hospital room during an experimental bone marrow transplant — and what he felt, and didn't feel, about God's presence The hiddenness of God versus Christ hidden in the faces of non-Christian friends The cross, the resurrection, and why one is visceral and the other remains mostly imagination The risk of faith, William James's mountain climber, and why Wallace Stevens kept pointing toward a further leap The "masters of suspicion" and why intellectual culture rewards doubt more than hope The hard sayings of Jesus — the passages that act like shards of glass, and what it means to park them rather than tame them Where two or three are gathered — and whether that was always a warning about what happens at five hundred You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia and shaped by the former Yugoslavia, his theology has always been grounded in lived encounter with violence, nationalism, and the misuse of religious language. Previous podcasts with Miroslav Faith in the Public Square in the Era of Trump. When Neighbors Turn on Neighbors Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, and editor widely regarded as one of the most important American religious writers of his generation. He is the author of My Bright Abyss — a memoir of faith written in the shadow of a rare blood cancer diagnosis — and multiple acclaimed poetry collections. He edited Poetry magazine for a decade and now teaches at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Gary Dorrien is spending six weeks teaching the history of Christian social ethics in America — and this week Aaron and I turned the lens on Gary himself, which he immediately identified as the worst session of the class. What followed was an hour of Gary tracing his own formation from a kid on Union Road in Midland who couldn't stop staring at the crucifix, through graduate school, liberation theology, democratic socialism, and fifty years of theological labor held together by Rauschenbusch's conviction that capitalism has overdeveloped our selfish instincts and shrunk our capacity for public ends. The crucifix, a seven-year-old on railroad tracks, and why the moral influence theory was second nature before Gary knew it was a theory Going to mass every morning at Union Seminary while reading Barth, Tillich, and Niebuhr — and the Jesuit friends who told him he was obviously a Protestant Gustavo Gutiérrez reading Rauschenbusch for the first time and asking why Americans don't talk about this treasure James Loder, a thousand-page manuscript, and the line "maybe you can find the book in here" His love Brenda — and why Gary can say almost nothing else except that his is a story of being saved by love and grace Why Hegel still grips him fifty years later — and why most people only know the wrong Hegel The six interpretive traditions of Hegel and why the theological-metaphysical one is the one most seminaries quietly abandoned William Temple, Whitehead, and why Gary became an Anglican almost entirely on the strength of one book Capitalism is bad for us and a catastrophe for the planet — a blunt response to a pastor whose congregation looks like a list of what capitalism does wherever it lands Purity politics, DSA, AOC, and why ridicule works but isn't good for us The flickering Galilean vision — and why it keeps flickering not despite being wrong but because it's right Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom Social Ethics for This Moment What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology The Future of Faith & Justice Theology for Action The Sacred, The Political, and Why We're All Vulnerable Come keep thinking with us — Theology Beer Camp 2026 This is exactly what we will be sitting with at Theology Beer Camp this October 8–10 in Kansas City. Our theme this year is the God-podcalypse. Cornell West is coming. So are a lot of your favorite theologians and podcasters and six hundred of your soon-to-be-favorite people. We are going to think together about what it means to be a people of faith in catastrophic times — without deodorizing the catastrophe, and without giving despair the last word. Don't wait. → TheologyBeer.Camp JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Cornell West says America is obsessed with problems but denies catastrophe — and the moment you reduce the catastrophic to the problematic, you have already deodorized the discourse, sanitized it, and started looking at the wasteland from the air-conditioned office of upper management. That line has been working on me since I sat with his Gifford Lectures, and this reflection is what came of it. I want to make one claim and trace it through two unlikely conversation partners. The claim is that the resurrection is apocalyptic blues — catastrophe lyrically expressed, the tragic named without evasion, despair stubbornly refused the last word — and that a church which cannot stay in the room with what is true is not capable of the gospel, because the gospel is a blues song. The conversation partners are Cornell, who has been telling us this in technical philosophical language for forty years, and episode three of The Last of Us, "Long, Long Time," where Bill plays Linda Ronstadt on the piano and his voice cracks, and sixteen years of love inside the apocalypse becomes a kind of theology no committee meeting and no strategic plan and no air-conditioned think piece about the future of the church will ever produce. We have routinely skipped past Good Friday to get to Easter because we wanted resurrection to be a problem solved rather than a song sung from inside the wreckage. The blues will not let us. Neither, I suspect, will the moment we are actually living in. Come keep thinking with us — Theology Beer Camp 2026 This is exactly what we will be sitting with at Theology Beer Camp this October 8–10 in Kansas City. Our theme this year is the God-podcalypse. Cornell West is coming. So are a lot of your favorite theologians and podcasters and six hundred of your soon-to-be-favorite people. We are going to think together about what it means to be a people of faith in catastrophic times — without deodorizing the catastrophe, and without giving despair the last word. Early-bird pricing ends April 30. Don't wait. → TheologyBeer.Camp JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Gary Dorrien is the Niebuhr Chair at Union, and nobody alive can walk you through the whole arc of Reinhold Niebuhr with his range — from the German-American pastor's kid at Elmhurst and Eden, to the Yale divinity student who felt like a country boy among thoroughbreds, to the Detroit preacher at Bethel Church writing articles in 1916 begging German Americans to prove their Americanism months before Wilson took the country into war, to the young professor at Union who felt like an imposter for a decade and overcompensated by ridiculing everyone in sight, to the author of Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), the bomb that ended the social gospel's fifty-year run and rerouted the entire field of American social ethics overnight. This is the second live Q&A for the Theology for Troublemakers class, and Gary, Aaron Stauffer, and I work through student questions covering the whole trajectory: why Niebuhr still towers over the field; what H. Richard's devastating private letter did to his brother's theology; how he metabolized Augustine into Christian realism in the Gifford Lectures that became Nature and Destiny; why Children of Light and Children of Darkness (1944) is the road not taken; and how Niebuhr drifted into establishment Democratic Party machinery with no emotional drama at all — the one transition he made smoothly, and arguably the one that cost the most. Plus the neocons who stole him, William Cavanaugh calling Gary a heretic at AAR in Montreal, Ron Stone tearing up when he says "saint," and the legendary Claremont nickname Five-Beer Barthian. Gary and Aaron are both coming to Theology Beer Camp in Kansas City in October. The class lives at homebrewedclasses.com. JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
There is a habit in Western theology so old it feels like air: imagining God as the supreme instance of coercive power — the divine despot whose omnipotence is measured by the capacity to override whatever resists. Whitehead called this the deep idolatry, and we would rather work like cross-builders than cross-bearers because of it. This essay argues that nonviolence is not a secondary ethical application of Christian faith, a political strategy, or a counsel of perfection for those with the luxury to afford it. Nonviolence is a metaphysical revelation — a disclosure of the actual structure of divine agency in the world, worked out across the long history of the cosmos and concentrated in the particular life of a first-century Jewish peasant. The power made perfect in weakness is not an exception to how the universe works. It is the deepest account of how the universe works. I am writing as someone who has done the cross-building too, and this is my attempt to name what is at stake when we make that choice, and what becomes possible when we stop. This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox. This lecture was sponsored by Humanitas, the Anabaptist Mennonite Centre at Trinity Western University. I was honored by the invitation, and the three days I spent with students and faculty were some of the best conversations I've had this year. My thanks to Dr. Myron Penner, who runs the Centre, and to Dr. Shannon Parrott and Dr. Jesse Nickel for their responses to the lecture — responses that sharpened the argument in real time. And to the Canadian podcast listeners who came out after the talk: you made the trip. ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
This is the first live Q&A for Theology for Troublemakers — the class Gary Dorrien, Aaron Stoffer, and I have been building for exactly this moment — and if the questions that came in after the first lecture are any indication, we've got a room full of people who came ready to learn. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr Chair at Union Seminary and has written more books and supervised more PhDs on the history of Christian social ethics in America than anyone alive. When Aaron said we could get Gary to join I was thrilled! This session covered the ground the first lecture opened up: what the social gospel actually was and why it took forty years to get its name (Walter Rauschenbusch held out until 1917, and even then conceded reluctantly), what social crises made the movement urgent, and why the Black social gospel is — as Gary puts it without hesitation — the better side of it. We went deep on the moral formation of Ida B. Wells and Reverdy Ransom: Wells going to four or five church services on a Sunday, working through her own rage at the Eliza Woods lynching before she could write about it, and eventually being burned out of Memphis for telling the truth about what lynching was actually about. Ransom, Harriet's son, clawing his way toward education in an Ohio that barely saw him, discovering socialist thought through George Herron's underlined pages, hiding his theological liberalism from bishops for years. We talked about the organizing question — why Frederick Douglass was wrong about race-specific organizations, why the Afro-American League and Council kept collapsing, why Booker T. Washington was the most famous living American in 1900 and used every bit of that power to undermine protest organizations, and what finally made the NAACP stick. And we ended with Ransom's late-life declaration that Africans and their descendants are the last spiritual reserves of humanity — part resignation, part prophecy, entirely worth sitting with. Next week: Reinhold Niebuhr. Gary's lecture is already on the resource page. If you haven't joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — it's donation-based, including zero. You'll get access to Gary's full lecture series tracing the history of Christian social ethics in America, Aaron's bonus interviews with leading scholars and activists, curated readings, discussion guides for small groups, and the online community. This is the class for right now. JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
So many clergy members and theology nerds messaged me after JD Vance told the Pope to dial back the theology talk that I had no choice — I called my friend Kevin Carnahan, co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and author of an extremely technical book on just war theory that he will tell you not to read. Kevin teaches at Central Methodist University in Missouri and he showed up having apparently thought about all of this in serious depth while the rest of us were just screaming into the void. What followed was one of the best episodes we've done. We traced the actual history of just war theory from Aquinas through John XXIII's Pacem in Terris— which moved the Catholic Church so close to pacifism in practice that nearly no war could satisfy its criteria — through the moment nuclear weapons broke the entire framework, through drone warfare and AI targeting that's broken it further, and right up to a Trump administration that dismantled the actual government office dedicated to minimizing civilian harm and then had the audacity to invoke just war theory as a fig leaf. Kevin's read on the papal conflict: the Pope knows exactly what he's doing and is faithfully representing a tradition that JD Vance passed through on Peter Thiel's E-Z Pass lane. We also got into the three streams of Protestant ethics on war — peace churches, just war thinkers, and crusaders — why Hegseth fits cleanly into the crusader category, why Trump fits none of them, why the Lord of the Rings is the best undergraduate ethics text available, and what Bonhoeffer's prayer for his own country's defeat sounds like in 2026. Tripp eventually brought up Tolkien. Bo noted it took an hour and eleven minutes. Bonhoeffer was invoked. John Cobb got in at the end. The trifecta complete. For those regular Homebrewed Christianity listeners, this is an episode of another weekly podcast Theology Nerd Throwdown that I do with Bo Sanders and our (nonviolent) army of theology nerds in the chat. If you enjoy it, subscribe to the TNT feed and feel the lure to join live most Friday mornings. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Kevin Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri.
It's Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass on Tax day! Also, apparently, the day the Vice President told the Pope to stop doing theology. Diana Butler Bass joined me for what was supposed to be a casual religion news roundup and turned into something I didn't entirely expect — a full-on church history seminar about what happens when empire tries to silence the gospel and why it never actually works. We started where everyone started this week: JD Vance, a newly minted Catholic who received what sounds like the Peter Thiel E-Z Pass lane through RCIA, publicly suggesting that the Pope — the Pope — should think more carefully before opining about theology. The same Pope who then responded to a Pentagon threat referencing the Avignon papacy by giving an even stronger anti-war speech. We talked about Trump's Easter posts, the Jesus meme, the "I thought I was a doctor" explanation, and the remarkable spectacle of evangelicals — evangelicals — saying the president might be demon-possessed. But Diana being Diana, she kept pulling the historical threads, and we ended up somewhere genuinely useful: the long story of how American Christianity split the sacred from the secular, why that split is breaking down, what it means for a congregation trying to figure out what to do with the 250th anniversary of a nation that's currently threatening popes and bombing people on Easter Sunday, and why Whitehead's image of the flickering Galilean vision might be the most honest thing you can say right now about where hope lives. We didn't ruin anything. The ruining is, as Diana noted, already adequately covered. Want to hangout with us in person?! Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! This conversation was originally for our Substack members, but we're sharing a portion with all of you – join us at The Process This or The Cottage to catch future episodes live! Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America's most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality. a Few Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp How the Lectionary Kept Me Christian Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can't Control Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0 The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy Faith in a Toxic Public Square The Resurrection of Jesus 2024: The Sequel The Christology Ladder The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner American Saints in a Cynical Age You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
I've been wearing glasses since seventh grade, when I discovered mid-car-ride that the rest of my family could actually read a license plate and I had no idea that was something people could do. When the optometrist put corrective lenses in front of my eyes for the first time, I gasped. That's the image I keep coming back to when I think about what happens when a philosophy filters out whole categories of human experience — not maliciously, just structurally, the way astigmatism works. You adapt so well to what you're missing that you don't know you're missing it. This essay is about that. It started with a conversation I witnessed between Philip Clayton and Dan Dennett — two brilliant philosophers, one coffee shop moment, and a question that stopped everything: where in a purely physical universe does "mattering" actually live? It moved through two more conversations in an Edinburgh coffee shop a week apart — one with a theologian who could defend every doctrine but couldn't explain why holding his newborn made him weep, and one with an evolutionary biologist who could describe the neurochemistry of her daughter's depression but couldn't answer the question her daughter was actually asking. Both were half-blind in the same direction, just from opposite sides. What I'm after here is coherence. Whitehead's test, Griffin's challenge, Clayton's emergence framework — the claim that a philosophy failing to account for time, causation, moral urgency, beauty, consciousness, or the felt reality of love isn't humble or rigorous. It's just incomplete. And the good news is that correcting for both eyes doesn't require abandoning science or embracing magic. It requires something harder: sitting with the full weight of human experience and refusing to explain any of it away. You can read this essay and find plenty of others on my Substack, Process This. Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
This one is a preview of something I've been wanting to do for a long time — a class on the history of Christian social ethics that's actually useful for the moment we're in. Cornell West calls Gary Dorrien the greatest living Christian social ethicist, and after spending any amount of time with him, you understand why. Gary and Aaron Stoffer joined me to give people a taste of what's coming in Theology for Troublemakers, and what they gave us was a genuine history lesson that landed like a live wire. We started with Gary's own formation — a rural Michigan kid who never took a school book home until second semester senior year, who walked into a Catholic church and couldn't stop staring at the figure on the cross, who read a biography of King in ninth grade three times and went looking for the theologians King mentioned in the public library and found none of them. That kid became one of the most important social ethicists of our time. From there we moved into Norman Thomas's warning — that American populism always surges toward a dictator who scapegoats the vulnerable — and what the left's recurring failure to build cross-racial, multi-issue coalitions has to do with where we are now. Gary named the nineties as the most demoralizing decade of his life: TINA, triangulation, NAFTA, three-strikes, welfare gutted, and a Democratic Party that treated its progressive base as something to prove it could overcome. He was not gentle about Clinton, or Obama, or the way purity politics has consistently kneecapped the left's ability to organize. He was hopeful, carefully, about cooperatives, about DSA's organizing culture in New York, and about the strange opening the current moment creates for public theology. The class runs the whole history — from the Black Social Gospel and the new abolitionists to the Christian realists to Yoder and Dorothy Day — and Aaron frames it all in terms of what congregations can actually do with it. Go to homebrewclasses.com. This is the class for right now. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Okay, I genuinely don't know how many times Tom Oord has been on this podcasttwenty plus times, but this one felt different, because Tom has officially done the thing: he wrote a Systematic Theology of Love, Volume One, which is also his 50th book, which means his wife has had to endure approximately 50 different versions of "another love book." We dug into what makes this project unusual — a progressive, open relational systematic theology organized around love as its orienting concept, built on abductive reasoning rather than deductive certainty, which turns out to matter a lot when the thing you're centering is inherently vulnerable, risky, and relational. Tom walked us through his claim that God is a universal spirit who is genuinely material without having a localized body, why he's done with creatio ex nihilo and what his very Latin replacement actually means, the distinction between animate organisms and inanimate aggregates (rocks, it turns out, are great for explaining panpsychism), and why he's invented a new word — Gino-Theology — to talk about God as a dynamic becoming rather than a static being. We also covered why he thinks Whitehead solved both the problem of evil and the problem of good, what he's planning for Volume Two around Christology and divine hiddenness, and ended up somewhere around the enchantment of the universe. The chat had 140 people. Tom's substack has chapters. And Volume Two starts in the fall — get in early. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Philip Clayton has been one of the most important conversation partners in my theological life — we literally worked out some of this stuff together at Claremont — so sitting down with him to trace the whole architecture of his thought from the beginning felt less like an interview and more like a reunion at the whiteboard. We started where Philip started: the secular believer, that figure he described in his Yale dissertation who carries doubt not as a problem to be solved before the real theology begins, but as the very medium through which faith moves. From there we mapped his six-level structure for how beliefs actually work — spoiler: about five percent of what Christians believe falls into the "demonstrably true" category, and the rest is a lot more interesting and honest than most of us admit. Philip walked us through what he learned from Pannenberg about doctrine as hypothesis, the racetrack-and-motorcycle story behind his concept of theological "traction," and why the shift from reductionism to emergence in contemporary science matters so much for anyone trying to think seriously about God and the world. We got into panentheism — why it's more compelling than classical theism, what it means for divine action, and how a Korean doctoral student's research on comfort women completely changed the way Philip thinks about where God shows up in the world. By the end, we were talking about what he calls a new architecture for Christian doctrine: not a final set of answers, but a set of questions a follower of Jesus simply has no choice but to keep returning to. This one is the long game. Pour something good. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
In this episode, theologian and historian Gary Dorrien opens Theology for Troublemakers by recovering two of the most important — and most forgotten — figures in American Christianity: Ida B. Wells and Reverdy Ransom. Dorrien traces the birth of the Black social gospel out of one excruciating question: what would a new abolition be? From Wells's explosive anti-lynching journalism and her landmark pamphlet Southern Horrors, to Ransom's vision of a cooperative commonwealth and his decades of prophetic ministry inside a church that kept trying to expel him, this lecture shows that the roots of liberation theology run far deeper than the 1960s — and that the tradition's most radical voices were being erased even as they were still speaking. If you want to go deeper, Gary Dorrien is teaching a full six-week course alongside Aaron Staufer and Tripp Fuller — covering Niebuhr, James Cone, the Welfare Rights Movement, and the challenge of Christian nationalism today. It's donation-based, including $0. Join us at HomebrewedClasses.com. You can WATCH the lecture and slides here. UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with Gary Dorrien, professor at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, about the life and legacy of Jesse Jackson and the Black social gospel tradition. They explore Dorrien's own intellectual journey from rural Michigan to the academy, his groundbreaking trilogy on the Black social gospel, Jackson's relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., the Rainbow Coalition presidential campaigns of the 1980s, and what Jackson's career reveals about the enduring ties between the Black church and progressive politics.Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.
In this final Q&A for our Jesus of Galilee series, I sat down with Dom Crosson to connect the dots between the hills of Galilee and the high-stakes political drama of Passion Week. We dove deep into how Jesus invited us away from the "apocalyptic delusion" of waiting for God to intervene and toward a participatory eschatology where we actually collaborate with the Divine. From unmasking the "asotopic fallacy" of biblical literalism to reimagining the resurrection as a collective human exit from imperial normalcy rather than a solo miracle, Dom reminds us that the Kingdom isn't a future escape but a present, distributive justice. We even got real about the "escalatory violence" of our own time, discussing what it looks like for faith communities to embody nonviolent resistance while war rages in Iran. It's a heavy, holy, and deeply subversive conversation to carry with you into Easter. If you want to hear all four lectures behind these Q&As and send in your own questions for our final session, head over to crossanclass.com — you can join for whatever you can give, including zero. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Okay, so confession: my kids had just gone to bed when we started this one, and honestly, the timing felt about right — because this conversation with Jarrod McKenna is the kind of thing you need to sit with after the noise dies down. Jarrod is an Australian activist, peacemaker, and theologian who's been doing this work since he got arrested at a US military base in the middle of the Australian desert back in 2002 — and the wild thing is, the world looks eerily similar now. We talked about what it actually means to follow a nonviolent Messiah when your government just joined a war you didn't vote for, how prayer isn't an escape hatch but a way of composting all the grief and rage so you can actually be useful, and why the just war tradition — which most Christians cheerfully ignore — would rule out basically everything happening right now. We got into the Black church's tradition of Christian socialism, why the megachurch model accidentally trained people to accept autocracy, and how base communities might be the most subversive thing you can plant in the shell of the old world. We also wandered into eschatology, Harry Potter, the Counting Crows, and whether God has been patient enough with this whole experiment for 13 billion years, that maybe we should take a deep breath. It's a lot — in the best way. Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! Australian peace award-winning pastor Jarrod McKenna has been described by Civil Rights legend Rev. Jim Lawson as 'an expert in nonviolent social change'. With over 20 years of experience in pastoral ministry and at the leading edge of climate justice, refugee rights, and nonviolent social change, Jarrod has seen his work featured internationally on the BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC, and The Guardian. Co-host of the InVerse and 'Good on Wood' podcasts, Jarrod pastors at Steeple Church (Melbourne) and Table in the Trees (Perth). He lives in the Perth hills on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja with his beloved, Kat, and their four sons. UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
What is the sin in Sinners? — and then four of the most brilliant theologians working today spent an hour doing what great theologians do: they cracked the whole thing open. Set in 1932 Mississippi and layered with blues, hoodoo, vampires, and Black survival, Ryan Coogler's film turns out to be a theological event, and this conversation treats it like one. Adam Clark names white supremacy as the film's central sin — parasitic, predatory, embodied in white vampires who can only survive by consuming Black vitality. Kelly Brown Douglas traces the deep dialectic between the blues and the Black church, and how the juke joint functions as a kind of invisible institution keeping Black faith alive from the underside. Juan Floyd-Thomas goes deep on conjure, Papa Legba, and why Sammy at the crossroads isn't just a blues musician but a gateway between the living and the dead. And Stacey Floyd-Thomas brings the womanist lens that names what the film itself only partially names: the women are the most spiritually powerful figures in the story, and they pay the highest price. By the end, someone looks around the room and says what a lot of us were thinking — Theology Beer Camp is a hush harbor. This is one of the most popular sessions from camp this year, and after you listen, you'll understand why. Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! Panel Members Kelly Brown Douglas is Visiting Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral. Juan Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches Black religion, race, religion, and film. Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society and Chair of African American Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Adam Clark is Professor of Theology and Director of Civic Engagement at Xavier University. Will Rose is the co-host of Systematic Geekology, a podcast exploring theology and pop culture for people who geek out on the deeper things. UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community are included.
Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and author of the memoir Over from Union Road, explains why he is known as America's leading champion of Christian socialismBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/tavis-smiley--6286410/support.
In this audio essay from my SubStack ,Process This, I take Stephen Miller's claim that the "real world" is governed by strength and force and use it as a window into something much bigger than one political figure—a diagnosis of the soul of America. Drawing on the thesis Tom Holland developed in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and the Black prophetic tradition of King and West, traced by Gary Dorrien in his 3 volume history of the Black Social Gospel movement, I argue that what we're witnessing isn't actually Christian nationalism triumphing—it's post-Christian nationalism wearing Christian clothes. The cross is still everywhere, but the crucified one has been removed, and what's left is just Rome again: empire, domination, and the ancient lie that might makes right. But here's where it gets really interesting—Niebuhr doesn't let progressives off the hook either, naming them as "children of light" who kept the Christian ethics of justice and victim-focus but severed them from grace, forgiveness, and the theological roots that make them sustainable. It's a prophetic call that refuses easy partisanship, traces the American rhetoric of force back through white supremacy to its Roman origins, and ultimately invites us back to the "sublime madness" of King's Beloved Community—where power is redefined not as domination but as the capacity to achieve a shared, constructive purpose. You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here. Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now. The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sara Gabler speaks with renowned theologian and social ethicist, Gary Dorrien, about his new memoir, Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life. The post The Intellectual Roots of Social Gospel Christians appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.
In this episode, we bring you a deep and reflective conversation from Theology Beer Camp focusing on the interlocking crises of democracy and religion in America. The panel took place on the Theology Nerd stage and was moderated by previous podcast guest, Aaron Stauffer from Wendland-Cook Program in Religion & Justice at Vanderbilt University and features esteemed scholars Robert C. Jones, Diana Butler Bass, and Gary Dorrien. They explore various dimensions of liberal democracy, social democracy, and the historical and present impacts of religion and race on American politics. The discussion delves into personal histories, the influence of the black social gospel, and practical steps for communities and churches to combat current socio-political challenges, particularly emphasizing community organizing and educational initiatives. If you want to get info, updates, and access to pre-sale tickets for Theology Beer Camp 2025 you can signup here. For information on Wendland-Cook's Solidarity Circles, a program to build virtual peer-networks for faith leaders, organizers, clergy, and members of the community to build grassroots solidarity, head over here. Previous Podcast Conversations Theology for Action with Aaron Stauffer Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism with Gary Dorrien James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology with Garry Dorrien Truth & Kindness in the Public Square with Diana Butler Bass (a bunch more are linked there) Aaron Stauffer is the Director of Online Learning and Associate Director of the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He earned his PhD in social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and has organized with the Industrial Areas Foundation in San Antonio, Texas and Religions for Peace. His work has appeared in Tikkun, Sojourners, The Other Journal, Political Theology, and CrossCurrents, as well as other scholarly and popular publications. Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America's most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality. Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won't want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life. Robert P. Jones. Is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the author of three books best-selling books, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future , White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, The End of White Christian America . _____________________ Join my Substack - Process This! Join our upcoming class - THE RISE OF BONHOEFFER, for a guided tour of Bonhoeffer's life and thought. Go with me to Berlin to spend a week in Bonhoeffer's House! Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of The Rise of Bonhoeffer, we journey with Dietrich to New York City for a year as a Postdoctoral post at Union Theological Seminary. This school year in New York radically changed him, but the spark that lit his theological imagination was outside the classroom. When he arrived in NYC, he brought an overtly intellectual faith he had used to justify a nationalist and militaristic faith. Through his encounter with the Harlem Renaissance, Abyssinian Baptist Church, and a road trip through the South, along with power friendships with people like Frank Fisher and Jean Lasserre, his vision of just what a disciple was called to be was transformed. This German who came contemplating the possibility of killing for blood and soil came to see himself anew as a disciple of Jesus. Jesus called his followers to bear a cross and not build one, to love their enemies and not kill them, and to practice solidarity with the suffering and exploited and not race, creed, or nation. Bonhoeffer came to discover that Jesus can always be found in the face of the Other. Without his time in New York and these transformative experiences, we would never have the Bonhoeffer so many admire. Follow the Rise of Bonhoeffer podcast here. Want to learn more about Bonhoeffer? Join our open online companion class, The Rise of Bonhoeffer, and get access to full interviews from the Bonhoeffer scholars, participate in deep-dive sessions with Tripp and Jeff, unpack curated readings from Bonhoeffer, send in your questions, and join the online community of fellow Bonhoeffer learners. The class is donation-based, including 0. You can get more info here. Featured Scholars in the Episode include: Reggie L. Williams is an Associate Professor of Theological Studies at St. Louis University. He is the author of “Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance,” which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Title in 2015 in the field of religion. The book focuses on Bonhoeffer's exposure to Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and worship at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist during his time at Union Seminary in New York from 1930 to 1931. Lori Brandt Hale, trained in philosophical theology and philosophy of religion, specializes in the life and legacy of German theologian and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and currently serves as the president of the International Bonhoeffer Society – English Language. She is the co-editor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theology, and Political Resistance. She is also the co-author of Bonhoeffer for Armchair Theologians. Stephen Haynes is the Albert Bruce Curry Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee and Theologian-in-Residence at Idlewild Presbyterian Church. He is a Dietrich Bonhoeffer scholar and author or editor of over 14 books including The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon, The Bonhoeffer Legacy, and The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump. In this book, Haynes examines “populist” readings of Bonhoeffer, including court evangelical Eric Metaxas's book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity and Theology Nerd Throwdown podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 45 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Join Dr. Jeffrey Pugh & Dr. Tripp Fuller as they delve into the complex life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The story flashes forward to a powerful juxtaposition: on February 1, 1933, two days after Hitler became Chancellor, both men addressed Germany. Hitler promised to restore national pride, while Bonhoeffer warned against creating an idol out of a leader. How did Bonhoeffer come to see the Nazi threat while so many others didn't? This episode begins the story by turning to his early life, his burgeoning critiques of National Socialism, and how his family, education, and travels deeply influenced his evolving theology. Discover how Bonhoeffer's early liberal theological perspectives, grappling with German nationalism, eventually led him to challenge authoritarianism and develop a profound ethical and theological stance against the Nazi regime. Follow the Rise of Bonhoeffer podcast here. Want to learn more about Bonhoeffer? Join our open online companion class, The Rise of Bonhoeffer, and get access to full interviews from the Bonhoeffer scholars, participate in deep-dive sessions with Tripp and Jeff, unpack curated readings from Bonhoeffer, send in your questions, and join the online community of fellow Bonhoeffer learners. The class is donation-based, including 0. You can get more info here. Featured Scholars in the Episode include: Victoria J. Barnett served from 2004-2014 as one of the general editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series of Bonhoeffer's complete works. She has lectured and written extensively about the Holocaust, particularly about the role of the German churches. In 2004 she began directing the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum until her retirement. Andrew Root is Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together, Faith Formation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, The Congregation in a Secular Age, Churches and the Crisis of Decline, The Church after Innovation, and The End of Youth Ministry? He is a frequent speaker and hosts the popular and influential When Church Stops Working podcast. Robert Vosloo is professor in Systematic theology at the Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and a senior researcher at the Beyers Naudé Center for Public Theology at the same institution. His most recent book is entitled Reforming Memory: Essays on South African Church and Theological History. Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity and Theology Nerd Throwdown podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 45 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this third interview with Dr. Gary Dorrien, the hosts discuss his forthcoming memoirs and kick off our series on The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness by going through his introduction to the newest print.
In this episode, I am joined by Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, to discuss his autobiography, notable contributions to social ethics, and the liberal theological tradition. The conversation addresses the evolution of liberal Protestantism, the intellectual and cultural challenges it faces, and the lasting impact of theologians like Schleiermacher, Bonhoeffer, and Niebuhr. Key themes include the intersection of theology and politics, the tension between tradition and modern criticism, and the importance of grounding theology within the church. If you enjoy this conversation, come hang out with Dr. Dorrien at Theology Beer Camp in Denver this October! Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won't want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life. WATCH the conversation here on YouTube _____________________ Join my Substack - Process This! Join our upcoming class - THE GOD OF THE BIBLE: An Absolutely Clear and Final Guide to Ultimate Mystery ;) Come to THEOLOGY BEER CAMP. Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Renowned social ethicist and theologian Rev. Gary Dorrien discusses the 60th Anniversary of The Civil Rights Act, his latest book “A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK,” and why we need a renewed moral vision in America.
This episode is a condensed recording of a live conversation between Andrew Wilkes, Gary Dorrien, and Andrew Wilkes exploring the power of the Black Social Gospel for the Civil Rights Movement through the present struggle for liberation and equity in the U.S. and beyond.
In this episode, Zen speaks with Gary Dorrien about his new book, Anglican Identities, recently published by Baylor University Press. Learn more about the book and Gary here: https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481320931/anglican-identities/
Words of WelcomeRev. Dr. Mark Williams, Senior MinisterRev. Angela Wells-Bean, Minister for Congregational CareInvocationRev. Dr. Mark WilliamsPastoral PrayerRev. Mark WilliamsScripture: Luke 17: 11-19 (NRSV)Rev. Angela Wells-BeanSermon: "The Samaritan as the Other"Rev. Gary DorrienBenedictionRev. Gary DorrienSupport the show
In this episode, Zen speaks with Dr. Susan Benton about her research on women in early Christianity and the Greco-Roman world and her work as a member of the ministry guidance team in Baylor's Religion Department. Learn more about the ministry guidance program at Baylor University: https://religion.artsandsciences.baylor.edu/ministry-guidance Check out Gary Dorrien's new book with Baylor University Press: https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481320931/anglican-identities/ Related Episodes: Bruce Longenecker on Greco-Roman associations: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/greco-roman-associations-and-the-new/id1648052085?i=1000605716630 Amy Marga on imagining motherhood: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/imagining-motherhood-in-the-christian-tradition/id1648052085?i=1000583436695 Dustin Benac on adaptive church and ministry: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/adaptive-church-dustin-benac-on-collaborative-christian/id1648052085?i=1000597869190
The hosts interview Dr. Stanley Hauerwas and Dr. Gary Dorrien about Christianity in the public square, Barth/Niebuhr stuff, and more.
The hosts interview Dr. Gary Dorrien to wrap up their first of two sections examining the life of Reinhold Niebuhr
Nathan Gilmour talks with Gary Dorrien about his recent book "American Democratic Socialism."
In this episode, you get a preview of what is going on in the Upsetting the Powers reading group. Each week we will be featuring a live session where Adam Clark and I discuss the week's theme, reading, and class questions... but wait...there's more :) there will also be an interview in which Adam talks with a fellow scholar and friend of James Cone. After you hear this I hope you join the class. Remember all the content is available for the members to go at their own pace and it is donation-based (including 0) so if you are interested come on in. Previous Episodes w/ Adam: Serene Jones & Adam Clark: Theology Matters and the Legacy of James Cone The Crisis of American Religion & Democracy: 1/6 a year later Christmas, BLM, Abortion, & the War on White Evangelicalism Jan 6th Theological Debrief: Adam Clark and Jeffrey Pugh Adam Clark: What is Black Theology? From Lebron James to the Black Panther: Black Theology QnA w/ Adam Clark Adam Clark: James Cone was right Dr. Adam Clark is Associate Professor of Theology at Xavier University. He is committed to the idea that theological education in the twenty first century must function as a counter-story. One that equips us to read against the grain of the dominant culture and inspires one to live into the Ignatian dictum of going forth “to set the world on fire.” To this end, Dr. Clark is intentional about pedagogical practices that raise critical consciousness by going beneath surface meanings, unmasking conventional wisdoms and reimagining the good. He currently serves as co-chair of Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion, actively publishes in the area of black theology and black religion and participates in social justice groups at Xavier and in the Cincinnati area. He earned his PhD at Union Theological Seminary in New York where he was mentored by James Cone. Dr. Gary Dorrien teaches social ethics, theology, and philosophy of religion as the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He was previously the Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College, where he taught for 18 years and also served as Dean of Stetson Chapel and Director of the Liberal Arts Colloquium. Professor Dorrien is the author of 20 books and more than 300 articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. Philosopher Cornel West describes him as “the preeminent social ethicist in North America today.” Philosopher Robert Neville calls him “the most rigorous theological historian of our time, moving from analyses of social context and personal struggles through the most abstruse theological and metaphysical issues.” Dorrien told an interviewer in 2016: “I am a jock who began as a solidarity activist, became an Episcopal cleric at thirty, became an academic at thirty-five, and never quite settled on a field, so now I explore the intersections of too many fields.” Follow the podcast, drop a review, or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, you get a preview of what is going on in the Upsetting the Powers reading group. Each week we will be featuring a live session where Adam Clark and I discuss the week’s theme, reading, and class questions… but wait…there’s more
Gary Dorrien's new book American Democratic Socialism is a comprehensive look at the deep roots, many of them religious, of democratic socialism in this country. Rev. Andrew Wilkes spoke with Professor Dorrien at a live event in New York City at Judson Memorial Church, where this podcast was recorded.
Doth Protest Too Much: A Protestant Historical-Theology Podcast
Rev. Sean Duncan joins us on this episode to discuss the great Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker. Sean serves as the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Marshall, TX. He is passionate about Christian education and is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He believes in staying true to Anglicanism while adapting to the methods of the future. Join Sean and Andrew as they discuss an important and defining era of Anglican history, and why not only every Episcopalian/Anglican but every Christian should read some Richard Hooker.Episode shownotes:The book we reference and encourage you to read that Sean is a co-editor of and that brings Richard Hooker's classic works into modern and accessible English is The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Volume 1 in Modern English from the Davenant Press, 2019. Available for purchase at this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PPB46BJ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1*Also, the mentions of Richard Hooker by Russel Kirk and Gary Dorrien are as follows:“Hooker's fundamental aim, to defend the Elizabethan settlement, was deeply conservative, as was his theology… Yet his commitment to the authority of reason and his ecumenical ecclesiology planted the seeds of Anglican Latitudinarianism and Broad Church Liberalism.”- Gary Dorrien from Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Wiley Blackwell & Sons, 2012) p. 109 “In Richard Hooker one discovers profound conservative observations which Burke inherited with his Anglicanism and which Hooker drew in part from the Schoolmen and their authorities…” – Russel Kirk from The Conservative Mind (Stellar Classics, e-book edition) location 218 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
This episode focuses on is how to organize money so that it fosters the flourishing of where we live and work through generating different kinds of institutions and ways of building wealth in a community to those that dominate the existing economy. Alternative, more democratic forms of economic production and investment and ways of structuring work and ownership are needed to address economic inequality, issues of racial equity, and the need for environmentally attuned forms of business. To discuss what is sometimes called the "solidarity economy," I talked to Felipe Witchger and Molly Hemstreet about the imaginative ways they are organizing money, how this work is embodied in a particular form of economic democracy - the cooperative - and how they envision a more just and generous kind of economy.GuestsMolly Hemstreet is the Executive Co-director for The Industrial Commons. She co-founded the organization in 2015 to support industrial workers across her region. She is a native of Morganton, North Carolina where she continues to work and raise her family. After leaving university and working for a bit as a teacher, she worked for the Center for Participatory Change organizing economic development initiatives across rural Western North Carolina in a response to the need for fair livelihoods, and then, in 2008, she founded Opportunity Threads, currently the largest, US based worker-owned company that does cut and sew work. She also co-founded the Carolina Textile District in 2013, which supports the resurgence of textiles across the Carolinas. Molly has also served on the national board of the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI) and the Board for the NC Employee Ownership Center. Felipe Witchger organizes at the intersection of cooperatives and financial investment. He co-convenes the US Economy of Francesco, at network of Catholics responding to Pope Francis's call for a more holistic vision of economic development, serves on the Board of Start.coop, and is Co-Founder of the Community Purchasing Alliance (CPA). Felipe has spent 10 years organizing education and faith leaders into a purchasing cooperative which is designed, governed, and owned by the communities it serves. Prior to CPA, Felipe led energy research and consulting initiatives with agencies such as Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF) and Groundswell.Resources for Going DeeperLuigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Another Idea of the Market, trans., N. Michael Brennen (Agenda Publishing, 2016);Gary Dorrien, ‘Rethinking and Renewing Economic Democracy,' Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice (Columbia University Press, 2010), Ch. 9;Vera Zamagni, “A Worldwide Historical Perspective on Cooperatives and Their Evolution,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mutual, Co-Operative, and Co-Owned Business, ed., Jonathan Michie, Joseph Blasi, and Cario Borzaga (Oxford University Press, 2017), Ch. 7; Jean-Louis Laville, “Social and Solidarity Economy in Historical Perspective,” in Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe, ed., Peter Utting (Zed Books, 2015), Ch. 1; Jessica Gordon Nembhard, ‘Introduction: A Continuous and Hidden History of Economic Defense and Collective Well-Being,' Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 1-26; Lawrence Goodwyn, “The Cooperative Vision: Building a Democratic Economy,” The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford University Press, 1978) Ch.3. A historical case study from the 19th C.
Author Gary Dorrien discusses his new book on the religious roots of social democracy. He describes how 19th and early 20th century Christians in Europe, Britain and the US laid the foundation of the ideology that would dominate western politics for 40 years after WWII - and why it's making a comeback.
Author Gary Dorrien discusses his new book on the religious roots of social democracy. He describes how 19th and early 20th century Christians in Europe, Britain and the US laid the foundation of the ideology that would dominate western politics for 40 years after WWII - and why it's making a comeback.
The year is 2017, and many of us are still reeling at the thought of having Trump in the office he's in. Over the past 4 years (I'm writing this just after the '20 election, Yay!) I've made no bones about the fact that I believe this presidency has done great harm to this country. So here, Rev. Gary Dorrien joins us for a conversation on his Religion Dispatches article, “Irony Repeats Itself: Reconsidering Reinhold Niebuhr in the Trump Era.” Rev. Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history. Prior to joining the faculty at Union and Columbia in 2005, Dorrien taught at Kalamazoo College, where he served as Parfet Distinguished Professor and as Dean of Stetson Chapel.
A sermon delivered by the Reverend Dr. Gary Dorrien on August 30, 2020.
Gary Dorrien Theological ethics in a time of crisis Watch the Video https://youtu.be/zXSKLWnPC5Q Listen to the Podcast
Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis nearly two weeks ago, American cities have seen protests over racism and police brutality on an unprecedented scale. On this episode we speak with Fr. Bryan Massingale, author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church and professor of theology at Fordham University in New York. Racism persists in America and the church, Massingale contends, because racist policies and structures benefit white people—and white people assent to it through a kind of perverse “liturgy.” Massingale also tells us what Americans shocked at Floyd's death, particularly white bystanders, need now: the virtue of courage, motivated by righteous anger. We must move beyond the mere conviction that racism is wrong, and actually begin dismantling it. For further reading: Police Brutality & Protest, The Editors A Sign of Contradiction, Gregory K. Hillis King & His Mentors, Gary Dorrien
Author Gary Dorrien discusses his new book on the religious roots of social democracy. He describes how 19th and early 20th century Christians in Europe, Britain and the US laid the foundation of the ideology that would dominate western politics for 40 years after WWII - and why it's making a comeback.
Author Gary Dorrien discusses his new book on the religious roots of social democracy. He describes how 19th and early 20th century Christians in Europe, Britain and the US laid the foundation of the ideology that would dominate western politics for 40 years after WWII - and why it's making a comeback.
Today we are in conversation with professor Gary Dorrien about the history of social democracy both in Europe and the United States. Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on social ethics and theology including Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice, The New Abolition, Breaking White Supremacy and his latest, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism. The post A History of Democratic Socialism in Europe and the US appeared first on KPFA.
Today we are in conversation with professor Gary Dorrien about the history of social democracy both in Europe and the United States. He discusses how the fallout from twenty years of neoliberal economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism -a democracy in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included. Christian socialism, he explains, paved the way for all liberation theologies that make the struggles of oppressed peoples the subject of redemption. He argues for a decentralized economic democracy and anti-imperial internationalism. Guest: Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on social ethics and theology including Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice, The New Abolition, Breaking White Supremacy and his latest, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism. The post A History of Democratic Socialism in Europe and The U.S. appeared first on KPFA.
We continue our series of conversations on the history of socialism, this time with Professor and author Gary Dorrien. In this episode, we discuss the American religious tradition of the social gospel and the black social gospel. These traditions would provide the intellectual underpinnings for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Guest: Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York City. An Episcopal priest, he is the author of several books and over one hundred articles that range across the fields of theology, philosophy, social theory, politics, ethics, and history. Today's conversation is based on his book Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. Donate to KPFA today!! The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara $150 MP3 CD Letters and Politics History of Socialism Pack $120 Combo: Book + MP3 CD $200 Tickets Diner and KPFA Tour w/ Brian Edwards-Tiekert, Cat Brooks, and Mitch Jeserich $500 The post Fund Drive Special – History of Socialism (Part 3/3) appeared first on KPFA.
Today we continue our series of conversations on the history of socialism. In this episode we talk about the raise of socialism and socialist politics, both in Europe and in the United States with Gary Dorrien. Guest: Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. His latest book is Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism. Keep KPFA on the Air, Go KPFA!! The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara $150 MP3 CD Letters and Politics History of Socialism Pack $120 Combo: Book + MP3 CD $200 Tickets Diner and KPFA Tour w/ Brian Edwards-Tiekert, Cat Brooks, and Mitch Jeserich $500 The post Fund Drive Special – History of Socialism Series (Part 2 of 3) appeared first on KPFA.
Revolutionary Love 2019: The Politics of Faith
Current Issues in Social Ethics and Religion with Gary Dorrien, Ph.D. Professor Dorrien has recently published books that address two issues currently central to the American political dialogue: 1) white supremacy, and 2) the meaning and origins of Social Democracy. In this brief series he will share his thoughts and the perspectives of religious imagination on both of these two critical issues. March 10: Social Democratic Decency: Then and Now In this session, Prof. Dorrien will address the issues he raises in his most recent publication, due to be released this month by Yale University Press. The title of his book: "Social Democracy in the Making: The Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism." Gary Dorrien, Ph.D. is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Theology and Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. His writings and research have ranged across many fields including ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, economics, and history. Philosopher Cornell West has described Dorrien as “the preeminent social ethicist in North America today,” and Robert Neville has claimed he is “the most rigorous theological historian of our time.” A graduate of Albion College (B.A.) and Union Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.), Professor Dorrien taught Religious Studies at Kalamazoo College for 18 years, where he was named the Parfet Distinguished Professor, served as Dean of Stetson Chapel, and directed the Liberal Arts Colloquium, before accepting his current position as a teacher of theology and social ethics at Union Theological Seminary. His book, "The New Abolition," was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in 2017, and his newest publication, "Breaking White Supremacy," just won the Choice Award in January of this year.
Professor Dorrien has recently published books that address two issues currently central to the American political dialogue: 1) white supremacy, and 2) the meaning and origins of Social Democracy. In this brief series he will share his thoughts and the perspectives of religious imagination on both of these two critical issues. In this session, Prof. Dorrien addresses issues of racism in America as developed in two of his recent publications: "The New Abolition: W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel," and "Breaking White Supremacy."
We are in conversation with professor Gary Dorrien talking about the history of the black social gospel tradition that included socialism and humanism and that heavily influenced Martin Luther King Jr. views of Christianity. Guest: Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of eighteen books that range across the fields of ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, and history. His most recent book is Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. The post Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel Tradition appeared first on KPFA.
The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien's The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America's most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Professor Gary Dorrien’s next book Breaking White Supremacy: "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Social Gospel," will soon be released by Yale University Press, a sequel to his most recent book The New Abolition: W.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel that formed the basis of his presentations in the All Souls Adult Forum two years ago. Breaking White Supremacy begins with the intellectual leaders of the black social gospel movement who most directly influenced the development of King’s theological and ethical thinking during his formative years.: Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and J. Pius Barbour. The thesis then moves to a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his political radicalization. October 22: The Radical King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (in Reidy Friendship Hall)
Howard Washington Thurman Crown Forum November 19, 2015 | 11:00 a.m. Featuring: Dr. Gary Dorrien (author of The New Abolition: W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel) Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel
Chuck and Patrick discuss Arizona's immigration law and interview Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary on his book The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective. Chuck takes offense over the Gary Dorrien's implication that Obama's opposition is motivated by a dislike of African American men and women.
Morning Prayers service with speaker Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, on Tuesday, October 15, 2013.
Gary Dorrien thinks he has the answer to "The Obama Question: a Progressive Perspective". Then, Marcie Stone has a project for the good of heart. Plus, the miracles of Bondo....and a Ron Paul support quiz.
Gary Dorrien is author of The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective, in which he looks at Barack Obama, the man & his history, and his policies, to see whether they pass muster from a progressive political & theological perspective. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 14 books and around 250 articles on a range of topics.
At the top of the show host Cyrus Webb welcomes back Gary Dorrien to discuss his book THE OBAMA QUESTION, the 2012 election and what he hopes you take away from it. At 20 min. past the hour, Conversations' resident chef Bruce Tretter gives tips on maintaining your body weight. Then at 30 min. past the hour Webb talks with author Felecia S. Killings about her book Fear, Faith and Patience.
Conversations LIVE host Cyrus Webb presents "America Under Obama: Three Years Later". His panel consisting of Journalist Billy Hallowell, Gary Dorrien (author of The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective), Author Stephen M. Grimble (For Love & Liberty) & author John Maher (Learning From The Sixties) discusses what they think of Obama's re-election chances, the GOP field and what it will take to get America turned around and back to work. This is one conversation you don't want to miss.
In this episode Dr. Shepherd interviews Dr. Gary Dorrien, who currently serves as the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. An Episcopal priest and multisport athlete, professor Dorrien is the author of 14 books and more than 250 articles on ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics and history. Princeton University philosopher Cornel West calls him, "The preeminent social ethicist in North America today," and Boston University's Robert Neville says professor Dorrien is "The most rigorous theological historian of our time, moving from analyses of social context and personal struggles through the most abstruse theological and metaphysical issues." Put on your thinking cap and join us as Dr. Tom and his guest make some deep ideas accessible to everyone.
Bill Moyers sits down with Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
A Bill Moyers Essay.
Bill Moyers looks at the influence of money and lobbying on health care reform efforts in Washington, D.C.
Bill Moyers talks to Cornel West, Serene Jones, and Gary Dorrien for a fresh take on what our core ethics and values as a society say about America's politics, policy, and the challenges of balancing capitalism and democracy. And, why are America's food banks suffering shortages? Find out what you can do to help.
Bill Moyers talks to Cornel West, Serene Jones, and Gary Dorrien for a fresh take on what our core ethics and values as a society say about America's politics, policy, and the challenges of balancing capitalism and democracy.
Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. An Episcopal priest, he was previously the Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College, where he taught for 18 years and also served as Dean of Stetson Chapel. Professor Dorrien is the author of 13 books and approximately 175 articles that range across the fields of ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, and history. Praised for their "intellectual creativity" and "stylish prose," these works include four books on social ethics and economic democracy, two acclaimed books on political neoconservatism, and a trilogy titled The Making of American Liberal Democracy: (I) Imagining Progressive Religion; (II) Idealism, Realism, and Modernity; (III) Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity. More than thirty reviewers have described the trilogy on liberalism as the definitive work in the field. The Expository Times called it "an endeavor best described, by all accounts, as magisterial, definitive, and authoritative." The Christian Century called it "a magnificent intellectual achievement." Boston University philosophical theologian Robert Neville wrote: "Dorrien is the most rigorous theological historian of our time, moving from analyses of social context and personal struggles through the most abstruse theological and metaphysical issues."
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