Gary Dorrien: 10 books

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 was hailed by many as a historic event and by some as the end of the Reagan era in American politics. But conservatives have condemned Obama from the beginning of his presidency, and many progressives charge that Obama has betrayed the causes...

Sourcing the major traditions of progressive Christian social ethics-social gospel liberalism, Niebuhrian realism, and liberation theology-Gary Dorrien argues for the social-ethical necessity of social justice politics. In carefully reasoned essays, he focuses on three subjects: the ethics and politics...

This magisterial follow-up to The New Abolition, a Grawemeyer Award winner, tells the crucial second chapter in the black social gospel’s history. The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with...

An expansive and ambitious intellectual history of democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists The fallout from twenty years of neoliberal economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism—a democracy...

Winner: 2012 The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Theology and Religious Studies, PROSE Award. In this thought-provoking new work, the world renowned theologian Gary Dorrien reveals how Kantian and post-Kantian idealism were instrumental in the foundation...

The black social gospel emerged from the trauma of Reconstruction to ask what a “new abolition” would require in American society. It became an important tradition of religious thought and resistance, helping to create an alternative public sphere of excluded voices and providing the intellectual...

In the early 1880s, proponents of what came to be called “the social gospel” founded what is now known as social ethics. This ambitious and magisterial book describes the tradition of social ethics: one that began with the distinctly modern idea that Christianity has a social-ethical mission to...

The Weimar Moment’s evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and “community” – or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, “race” – cannot but appeal to us today. This...

Applied Christian Ethics addresses selected themes in Christian social ethics. The book is divided in three parts. In the first section, “Foundation,” several contributors reveal their Christian realist roots and discuss the prophetic origins and multifarious agenda of social ethics. Thus, the...

This work argues that the influence of neoconservatives has been none too small and all too important in the shaping of this monumental doctrine and historic moment in American foreign policy. Through a fascinating account of the central figures in the neoconservative movement and their push for war...