Gary Dorrien


Gary John Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.
Prior to joining the faculty at Union and Columbia in 2005, Dorrien taught at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he served as Parfet Distinguished Professor and as Dean of Stetson Chapel.
An Episcopal priest, he has taught as the Paul E. Raither Distinguished Scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and as Horace De Y. Lentz Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dorrien is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America's Religion and Socialism Commission.

Awards

Dorrien won the American Library Association's Choice Award in 2009 for his book Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, which The Christian Century described as "magnificent, sprawling and monumental."
He won the Association of American Publishers' PROSE Award in 2012 for his book Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology, described as “a brilliant and much needed account of the influence of Immanuel Kant and the tradition of post-Kantian idealism on modern theology.”
He won the Grawemeyer Award in 2017 for his book The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel.
He won the Choice Award in 2018 for his book Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, which Choice described as “intellectual history at its finest...A triumph of careful scholarship, rigorous argument, clear prose, unblinking judgments and groundbreaking conclusions…indispensable.”

Books