Professor Gary Dorrien 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. He was previously the Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College, where he taught for 18 years and also served as Dean of Stetson Chapel and Director of the Liberal Arts Colloquium. Professor Dorrien is the author of 20 books and more than 300 articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. Philosopher Cornel West describes him 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.”

Dorian has received numerous awards for his books. And he has written about economic democracy and social justice politics, post-Kantian philosophy, and modern theology throughout his career. His many books include Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, which won the PROSE Award, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, which won the Grawemeyer Award, and Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King and the Black Social Gospel, which won the American Library Association Award. His new book, published in September 2021 by Yale University Press, is American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory.

(Adapted from https://www2.lehigh.edu/news/union-theological-seminarys-gary-dorrien-named-baccalaureate-speaker)