Published: June 13, 2026; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 254 Hicks Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Phone: +1 (718) 624-1850
Web: https://gracebrooklyn.org/Featuring Dr. Gary Dorrien, professor of social ethics, theology, and philosophy of religion at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary.
Grace Church Brooklyn Heights invites you to a free lecture, “Trying to Save America: The Black Social Gospel, Then and Now,” timed in the lead-up to America’s 250th Birthday.
Featuring Dr. Gary Dorrien, who teaches social ethics, theology, and philosophy of religion as the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, this lecture will discuss Black American Christianity, double-consciousness, and the struggle for justice.
Dr. Dorrien has published several books, including a three-volume work, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel; Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel; and A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK (Yale University Press, 2015, 2018, 2023).
All are welcome. A light lunch will be served.
The Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He has authored 25 books, including his latest memoir, Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life, and more than 300 articles that span the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history.
Dorrien told an interviewer in 2016 that he is “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.”
He is considered one of the “most gifted historians of ideas in the world” (Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson), “the preeminent social ethicist in North America today” (Dr. Cornel West), and “the most rigorous theological historian of our time” (Robert Cummings Neville).
Time: 11:00 am EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.