About this episode

The episode features a discussion on the history of Christian social ethics and its relevance to contemporary issues, with insights from Gary Dorrien and Aaron Stauffer.

This one is a preview of something I've been wanting to do for a long time — a class on the history of Christian social ethics that's actually useful for the moment we're in. Cornell West calls Gary Dorrien the greatest living Christian social ethicist, and after spending any amount of time with him, you understand why. Gary and Aaron Stoffer joined me to give people a taste of what's coming in Theology for Troublemakers, and what they gave us was a genuine history lesson that landed like a live wire. We started with Gary's own formation — a rural Michigan kid who never took a school book home until second semester senior year, who walked into a Catholic church and couldn't stop staring at the figure on the cross, who read a biography of King in ninth grade three times and went looking for the theologians King mentioned in the public library and found none of them. That kid became one of the most important social ethicists of our time. From there we moved into Norman Thomas's warning — that American populism always surges toward a dictator who scapegoats the vulnerable — and what the left's recurring failure to build cross-racial, multi-issue coalitions has to do with where we…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guests: Gary Dorrien, Aaron Stauffer

Topics covered

• Christian social ethics
• American populism
• cross-racial coalitions
• political history
• social justice

Keywords

• Christian ethics
• social justice
• political history
• populism
• coalitions

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Democratic Party, NAFTA, American populism

Places: Michigan

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