For decades, Rev. Gary Dorrien has had an unparalleled impact on Union Theological Seminary. Now, after authoring more than two dozen books and 300 articles, he’s releasing a memoir titled Over from Union Road, which details his journey and offers profound insights for the religious left.
Rev. Dorrien grew up in a poor neighborhood in Bay County, Michigan. His house sat on a dirt road. There were shacks and trailers and empty lots to the right, and working-class homes to the left.
Reflecting on his early life, Rev. Dorrien recalled that three things shaped him. One was being a multi-sport athlete. The second influence was the stunning image “of the crucified Jesus overhanging the altar – a strange, fixating, theologically-loaded mystery that broke through my lower-class world like nothing else.”
The third influence was the civil rights movement. Rev. Dorrien was riveted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement. He recalled being a “bad student” who didn’t read schoolbooks and couldn’t pay attention in class. But he read every book he could find about Dr. King, who exemplified to him a religious ideal about pouring oneself out for others.
After receiving his undergraduate degree, Rev. Dorrien went to Harvard to study philosophy and theology. But then, his world shattered. His younger brother Andy was killed. Rev. Dorrien needed to grieve away from the friends he had made at Harvard.
He called Union to see if they would take him in as a student. Union’s Acting Dean Robert Handy said, “You just come. We have a place for you.”
Rev. Dorrien spent a year at Union. He immersed himself in the classes of eminent biblical scholar Fr. Raymond Brown – and later recalled that he became a “sponge” for everything Brown taught.
Rev. Dorrien subsequently earned two degrees at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he met his wife Brenda Biggs, and moved with her to Albany, New York. There, he was deeply involved in labor organizing, democratic socialist activism, and Central American solidarity.
He wrote his first three books while serving as an organizer and an Episcopal priest. Rev. Dorrien’s friends urged him that he was called to be an academic. In 1987, he decided that they were right, and began his teaching career at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.
Over the following years, Rev. Dorrien wrote numerous books in theology, social ethics, philosophy, and political history. But for ten years, his life also revolved around Brenda’s excruciating battle with cancer, until her death in 2000. He declined several offers from other schools until his daughter Sara graduated from high school.
Then in 2005 he came to Union, choosing the school because it is an “indispensable seminary with a unique legacy in theological education and social justice activism.” Union, he explained, was the epicenter of the social gospel, Christian realism, Black liberation theology, feminist social ethics, and the womanist movement. Today, Union embodies its entire past as a progressive theological institution.
Asked what gives him his greatest satisfaction about his career at Union, he immediately responded: “The students, while we have them, and later watching them do wonderful things in the world.”
In recent years, Rev. Dorrien has authored a trilogy on the Black social gospel tradition, two books on democratic socialism, and three books on theology and religious philosophy. The two books that he cares most about, he said, are The New Abolition: W. E. B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel, because it is the foundational volume of his interpretation of the Black social gospel tradition, and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent, because it distills the entire theological-philosophical side of his work.
When asked for his message, Rev. Dorrien cited the ending of his memoir published in November 2024, Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life:
“I need all the faith, hope, and love I can get, and I cannot get any of it on my own. Only through the ties of faith and love with others that grace my life do I have any capacity for hope. Love divine calls out from created things the love for which all things are created to be, pouring through all the processes of life across all boundaries, exceeding what we understand. We enter the mystery of the divine by its grace, beginning in faith with that which transcends faith and draws it forth.”