Theologian Gary Dorrien to speak at Virginia Tech this week

18 Mar 2015

Theologian and social ethicist Gary Dorrien will give a public lecture at Virginia Tech on Thursday as the university’s 2015 Hammond Lecturer.

“Professor Dorrien is America’s leading scholar of religious ethics in the tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr and a major public intellectual committed to questions of social justice,” said Professor Brian Britt, chair of the Department of Religion and Culture.

Dorrien teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York as the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics and is a professor of religion at Columbia University.

Also an Episcopal priest, Dorrien has written 16 books and nearly 300 articles on ethics, history, theology, philosophy, and politics. His book “Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology” won the Association of American Publishers’ 2013 award for book of the year in theology and religious studies.

Dorrien’s free lecture, titled “Common Goods: Social Ethics, Global Economy, and Economic Democracy,” will be 7 p.m. in 300 Whittemore Hall, 1185 Perry Street. The program is supported by the Hammond Lecture and Religious Ethics Endowment in the Department of Religion and Culture.

Dorrien will also lead a campus seminar Friday on his work in progress, “The New Abolition: W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel.” The seminar will be from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. in Solitude, 705 West Campus Drive.