Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
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 are now. Gary named the nineties as the most demoralizing decade of his life: TINA, triangulation, NAFTA, three-strikes, welfare gutted, and a Democratic Party that treated its progressive base as something to prove it could overcome. He was not gentle about Clinton, or Obama, or the way purity politics has consistently kneecapped the left's ability to organize. He was hopeful, carefully, about cooperatives, about DSA's organizing culture in New York, and about the strange opening the current moment creates for public theology. The class runs the whole history — from the Black Social Gospel and the new abolitionists to the Christian realists to Yoder and Dorothy Day — and Aaron frames it all in terms of what congregations can actually do with it. Go to homebrewclasses.com. This is the class for right now.
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 are now. Gary named the nineties as the most demoralizing decade of his life: TINA, triangulation, NAFTA, three-strikes, welfare gutted, and a Democratic Party that treated its progressive base as something to prove it could overcome. He was not gentle about Clinton, or Obama, or the way purity politics has consistently kneecapped the left's ability to organize. He was hopeful, carefully, about cooperatives, about DSA's organizing culture in New York, and about the strange opening the current moment creates for public theology. The class runs the whole history — from the Black Social Gospel and the new abolitionists to the Christian realists to Yoder and Dorothy Day — and Aaron frames it all in terms of what congregations can actually do with it. Go to homebrewclasses.com. This is the class for right now.
