American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory by Gary Dorrien

This week, we lift up our amazing comrade Gary Dorrien’s important new book, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory. The book is available to be ordered from Yale University Press here. Here is what another Religion and Socialism Working Group comrade, Geoffrey Kurtz, had to say about it:

“American Democratic Socialism is a brilliant and timely book. Dorrien offers a big, ambitious, synthetic political and intellectual history of the whole American democratic socialist tradition, giving particular attention to religious socialists, the centrality of race in American politics, and the intellectual contributions of women.”—Geoffrey Kurtz, author of Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy.

Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America, writes, “Gary Dorrien is the greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century, our most compelling political theologian, and one of the most gifted historians of ideas in the world. His American Democratic Socialism is a work of astonishing erudition. Best of all, Dorrien is not only a searing chronicler of prophetic thought, but also a bold Christian participant in the historic quest for social justice.” 

An excerpt from Dorrien’s book–an article titled “Visionary Gradualist Pressure: Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialism,” can be read on Commonweal’s website here.