Gary Dorrien – författare

The award–winning author of The New Abolition continues his history of black social gospel with this study of its influence on the Civil Rights movement. The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magnificent rhetoric, and ended in nightmarish despair. It won a few legislative victories and had a profound impact on U.S. society, but failed to break white supremacy. The symbol of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., soared so high that he tends to overwhelm anything associated with him. Yet the tradition that best describes him and other leaders of the civil rights movement has been strangely overlooked. In his latest book, Gary Dorrien continues to unearth the heyday and legacy of the black social gospel, a tradition with a shimmering history, a martyred central figure, and enduring relevance today. This part of the story centers around King and the mid-twentieth-century black church leaders who embraced the progressive, justice-oriented, internationalist social gospel from the beginning of their careers and fulfilled it, inspiring and leading America’s greatest liberation movement.

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 and development of modern Christian theology.

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 and development of modern Christian theology.

Gary Dorrien expounds in this book the religious philosophy underlying his many magisterial books on modern theology, social ethics, and political philosophy. His constructive position is liberal-liberationist and post-Hegelian, reflecting his many years of social justice activism and what he calls "my dance with Hegel." Hegel, he argues, broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself; yet his white Eurocentric conceits were grotesquely inflated even by the standards of his time. Dorrien emphasizes both sides of this Hegelian legacy, contending that it takes a great deal of digging and refuting to recover the parts of Hegel that still matter for religious thought.

By distilling his signature argument about the role of post-Kantian idealism in modern Christian thought, Dorrien fashions a liberationist form of religious idealism: a religious philosophy that is simultaneously both Hegelian—as it expounds a fluid, holistic, open, intersubjective, ambiguous, tragic, and reconciliatory idea of revelation—and post-Hegelian, as it rejects the deep-seated flaws in Hegel’s thought. Dorrien mines Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel as the foundation of his argument about intellectual intuition and the creative power of subjectivity. After analyzing critiques of Hegel by Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas, Dorrien contends that though these monumental figures were penetrating in their assessments, they appear one-sided compared to Hegel. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit further engages with the personal idealist tradition founded by Borden Parker Bowne, the process tradition founded by Alfred North Whitehead, and the daring cultural contributions of Paul Tillich, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, David Tracy, Peter Hodgson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, and Monica Coleman.

Dispelling common interpretations that Hegel’s theology simply fashioned a closed system, Dorrien argues instead that Hegel can be interpreted legitimately in six different ways and is best interpreted as a philosopher of love who developed a Christian theodicy of love divine. Hegel expounded a process theodicy of God salvaging what can be salvaged from history, even as his tragic sense of the carnage of history cuts deep, lingering at Calvary.

The Anglican Communion currently finds itself at an inflection point as it weighs its future prospects in light of discordant social, political, ecclesiological, and theological commitments. In this intellectual and political history of Anglicanism, Gary Dorrien shows that the Communion’s present challenges are the upshot of a centuries-old clash of Anglican identities. Tracing the narrative of Anglicanism from its ancient and medieval origins through the English Reformation and up to the last quarter of the twentieth century, Dorrien argues that Anglican Christianity is at once an ecumenical project, residing at the halfway point between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, a theological movement informed by a brand of idealism centered in the incarnational faith of Logos theology, and an imperial enterprise complicit in the racist sickness of Western civilization.

A book long in the making, Anglican Identities offers a comprehensive, informative, and sobering account of the story of Anglicanism. Dorrien covers the key figures, periods, movements, and theological concerns from the Communion’s history, framing them in an interpretation of Anglican Christianity informed by decades in the classroom and his unique liberal-liberationist and activist reading of theology, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

Dorrien contends that Anglicanism has been sort-of ecumenical from the beginning, with a radical ecumenical aspirational vision, and in its liturgies and teachings has embodied and enacted an idealist approach to the claims of the Christian theological tradition. But Dorrien urges that these features of the Anglican story are deeply at odds with English Anglicanism’s entanglement with white colonialism. Indeed, in Dorrien’s telling, this antinomy between its identity as an ecumenically generous religion of the incarnate Logos and its willing involvement in white supremacy is at the very heart of Anglican Christianity.