Economy, Difference, Empire

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 more than a dozen books, including most recently the three-volume The Making of Liberal Theology and Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition.

Through a collection of 19 essays, the gifted social ethicist not only explores the origins and heights of the social justice movement in American liberal Christianity but studies its challengers and traces its decline The Christian Century Like his previous works, Economy, Difference, Empire not only displays Dorrien's passion for remembering the past but also his ability to discern what aspects of the past are still valuable. He writes vividly and clearly about history, ethics, and theology, and he understands that the voices of religious and political progressivism, whose stories he loves to tell, should not be consigned to the dusty shelves of a library. Journal of Church and State

• Introduction Acknowledgments Part I: The Social Gospel and Niebuhrian Realism 1. Society as the Subject of Redemption: Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and the Social Gospel 2. Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, and the Crises of War and Capitalism 3. The Niebuhrian Legacy: Christian Realism as Theology, Ethics, and Public Intellectualism 4. Ironic Complexity: Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, Modernity, and Racial Justice Part II: Economic Democracy in Question 5. Norman Thomas and the Dilemma of American Socialism 6. Michael Harrington and the "Left Wing of the Possible" 7. Christian Socialism as Tradition and Problem 8. Breaking the Oligarchy: Globalization, Turbo-Capitalism, Economic Crash, Economic Democracy 9. Rethinking and Renewing Economic Democracy Part III: Neoconservatism and American Empire 10. The Neoconservative Phenomenon: American Power and the War of Ideology 11. Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the Iraq War 12. Militaristic Illusions: The Iraq Debacle and the Crisis of American Empire 13. Empire in Denial: American Exceptionalism and the Community of Nations Part IV: Social Ethics and the Politics of Difference 14. The Feminist Difference: Rosemary R. Ruether and Eco-Socialist Christianity 15. Pragmatic Postmodern Prophecy: Cornel West as Social Critic and Public Intellectual 16. As Purple to Lavender: Katie Cannon and Womanist Ethics 17. Religious Pluralism as a Justice Issue: Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Ecumenism 18. The Obama Phenomenon and Presidency 19. Social Ethics in the Making: History, Method, and White Supremacism Notes Index