A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK
ISBN: 9780300271355
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: African Studies;

The third and final volume in the first comprehensive history of Black social Christianity, by the "greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century" (Michael Eric Dyson)

The Black social gospel is a tradition of unsurpassed and ongoing importance in American life, argues Gary Dorrien in his groundbreaking trilogy on the history of Black social Christianity. This concluding volume, an interpretation of the tradition since the early 1970s, follows Dorrien's award-winning The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel and Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel .

Beginning in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., Dorrien examines the past fifty years of this intellectual and activist tradition, interpreting its politics, theology, ethics, social criticism, and social justice organizing. He argues that Black social Christianity is today an intersectional tradition of discourse and activist religion that interrelates liberation theology, womanist theology, antiracist politics, LGBTQ+ theory, cultural criticism, progressive religion, broad-based interfaith organizing, and global solidarity politics.

A Darkly Radiant Vision features in-depth discussions of Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Gayraud Wilmore, James Cone, Cornel West, Katie Geneva Cannon, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Traci Blackmon, William J. Barber II, Raphael G. Warnock, and many others.


Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. His books include 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 , Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism , and American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory . He lives in New York City.
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