Dorrien is a Columbia University professor, an Episcopal priest, a former dean and the author of 12 books

HARTFORD, Conn. – Gary Dorrien, who has had a distinguished career as a theologian, professor and author, will be teaching a course on Modern American Theology at Trinity in the spring 2008 semester.

Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York City. An Episcopal priest, he was previously the Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College, where he taught for 18 years and also served as Dean of Stetson Chapel.

Dorrien has written 12 books and approximately 150 articles spanning ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, and history. His body of work includes three books on economic democracy and social ethics, two widely acclaimed books on political neo-conservatism and a trilogy titled, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion; Idealism and Realism in Modernity, 1900-2003; and Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2003.

Reviewers have called Dorrien’s three volumes on American theological liberalism the definitive works in the field. Indeed, Boston University philosophical theologian Robert Neville wrote, “Dorrien is 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 has served as a peer reviewer for the University of Chicago Press, Journal of American History, Journal of Religion, University of Notre Dame Press, Tempe University Press, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Westminster John Knox Press, and Baker Books.

He served last year on the National Council of Churches/United Presbyterian Church project on the new Social Creed of the Churches and the Ford Foundation’s academic study of religion virtual think tank project. He is a member of the Distinguished Lecturers Program of the Organization of American Historians and is a recent past president of the American Theological Society.

In addition, Dorrien has a record of involvement in social justice, human rights, and environmental and anti-war organizations. His recent book, Imperial Designs, grew out of his opposition to the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq.

At Trinity, Dorrien’s course will look at the major theological movements, topics and thinkers of American mainline Protestantism from the early 20th century to the present day and American Catholicism from the 1950s to the present day. Other topics will include evangelical liberalism, the Social Gospel movement, the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, Boston School personalism, Chicago School naturalistic empiricism, neo-orthodoxy and Christian realism, the ecumenical movement, the Civil Rights movement, secularism, process metaphysics, Vatican II, the death-of-God controversy, liberation theology, feminist theology, environmentalism, and postmodernism.

Major theologians and philosophers will include Walter Rauschenbusch, Shailer Mathews, Edgar S. Brightman, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Martin Luther King Jr., Gregory Baum, Rosemary Radford Ruether, John B. Cobb Jr., J. Deotis Roberts, and Elizabeth Johnson.