Gary Dorrien is spending six weeks teaching the history of Christian social ethics in America — and this week Aaron and I turned the lens on Gary himself, which he immediately identified as the worst session of the class. What followed was an hour of Gary tracing his own formation from a kid on Union Road in Midland who couldn't stop staring at the crucifix, through graduate school, liberation theology, democratic socialism, and fifty years of theological labor held together by Rauschenbusch's conviction that capitalism has overdeveloped our selfish instincts and shrunk our capacity for public ends.

• The crucifix, a seven-year-old on railroad tracks, and why the moral influence theory was second nature before Gary knew it was a theory
• Going to mass every morning at Union Seminary while reading Barth, Tillich, and Niebuhr — and the Jesuit friends who told him he was obviously a Protestant
• Gustavo Gutiérrez reading Rauschenbusch for the first time and asking why Americans don't talk about this treasure
• James Loder, a thousand-page manuscript, and the line "maybe you can find the book in here"
• His love Brenda — and why Gary can say almost nothing else except that his is a story of being saved by love and grace
• Why Hegel still grips him fifty years later — and why most people only know the wrong Hegel
• The six interpretive traditions of Hegel and why the theological-metaphysical one is the one most seminaries quietly abandoned
• William Temple, Whitehead, and why Gary became an Anglican almost entirely on the strength of one book
• Capitalism is bad for us and a catastrophe for the planet — a blunt response to a pastor whose congregation looks like a list of what capitalism does wherever it lands
• Purity politics, DSA, AOC, and why ridicule works but isn't good for us
• The flickering Galilean vision — and why it keeps flickering not despite being wrong but because it's right

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew
• What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom
• Social Ethics for This Moment
• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice 
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Come keep thinking with us — ⁠Theology Beer Camp 2026⁠

This is exactly what we will be sitting with at ⁠Theology Beer Camp this October 8–10 in Kansas City⁠. Our theme this year is the God-podcalypse. Cornell West is coming. So are a lot of your favorite theologians and podcasters and six hundred of your soon-to-be-favorite people. We are going to think together about what it means to be a people of faith in catastrophic times — without deodorizing the catastrophe, and without giving despair the last word. Don't wait. → ⁠TheologyBeer.Camp

JOIN ⁠⁠THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.

Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.

💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com⁠⁠⁠⁠

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