User:Estafford/sandbox

Gary Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.

He has authored 16 books and over 250 articles on ethics, philosophy, social and political theory, theology, and intellectual history. Princeton University philosopher Cornel West describes Dorrien as “the preeminent social ethicist in North America today” and Boston University religious philosopher Robert Neville describes him as “the most rigorous theological historian of our time.” University of Georgia philosopher Frederick Ferré calls him “a superstar interpreter of modern religious thought.”

Dorrien was born in 1952 and grew up in a semi-rural, lower-class area in mid-Michigan, Bay County. His family subsequently moved to nearby Midland. His parents, Jack and Virginia Dorrien, came from poor areas in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In his book, Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice, Dorrien recounted that his father experienced racial abuse for his Native American (Cree) bloodline and that he tried to shield his five sons from a similar experience. From his own early youth, Dorrien recounted, he had a mystical impulse, despite growing up in a nominally Catholic family: “I got just enough exposure to Catholic symbolism to be influenced by it. Before I got to college and took an unlikely path, the image of the suffering God in Catholic iconography broke through my everyday horizon of lower-class culture and the next game, as did the stunning witness of the Civil Rights movement—two signs of transcendence that melded together in my imagination and feeling.”

Dorrien explained that long before he understood very much about religion or politics, he was deeply influenced by “Jesus crucified” and the witness of Martin Luther King Jr.: “And after King was assassinated, he seemed a Christ-figure without qualification, the exemplar of the peacemaking and justice-making way of Jesus. That was the extent of my religious worldview when I squeaked into college, mostly to play sports. Forty years later it is still my touchstone.”

A multi-sport athlete in high school and college, Dorrien attended Alma College in Alma, Michigan, where he studied philosophy, physics, theology, and sociology. He subsequently earned graduate degrees at Union Theological Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Union Graduate School, specializing in social ethics. Dorrien’s early books flowed from his graduate training and his involvement in social justice movements, working at the intersections of social ethics with social theory, politics, theology, philosophy, and intellectual history.