In this concluding volume of his magisterial trilogy, Gary Dorrien sustains his previous definition of liberal theology and his mixture of theological, philosophical, and historical analysis, while emphasizing the unprecedented diversity of liberal theology in the postmodern age. Dorrien argues that liberal theology has been in crisis for the past half-century, yet despite the crisis, and also because of it, it has also experienced a “hidden renaissance” of intellectual creativity. Liberal theology in the early twenty-first century is more diverse, complex, and marginalized than ever before in its history, he concludes, but its essential idea–creating a progressive, credible, integrative third way between orthodox over-belief and secular unbelief–remains as necessary as ever.
Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Religion, Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty books and three hundred articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. He is a two-time recipient of the American Library Association’s Choice Award, a 2012 recipient of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award, and a 2017 recipient of the Grawemeyer award for his book The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel.
7
7
Social critic Michael Eric Dyson wrote in 2021: “Gary Dorrien is the greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century, our most compelling political theologian, and one of the most gifted historians of ideas in the world.” Philosopher Cornel West describes Dorrien 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.”
“