Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life

Gary Dorrien, the renowned social ethicist, theologian, and intellectual historian whose many books are routinely described as magisterial and definitive, in this book turns to interpret his own life as a participant in the religious, intellectual, and social justice currents of his generation. Dorrien tells his personal story of growing up in a working-class family in mid-Michigan, fixing on the crucifix in his Roman Catholic parish, being an inattentive student and a voracious reader, getting through high school mostly because he was a high-profile athlete, and being riveted by the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King Jr. At Alma College he began to develop his signature blend of post-Kantian philosophy and Christian socialist theology, mostly in autodidactic fashion, with no intention of becoming an academic.

His graduate education was searingly interrupted by the death of his younger brother. Dorrien emerged from seminary as a social justice organizer and independent scholar. As he later explained to an interviewer, I am a jock who began as a solidarity activist, became an Episcopal cleric at thirty, became an academic at thirty-five, and never quite settled on a field, so now I explore the intersections of too many fields. Over from Union Road is a rich memoir of this unusual journey and of Dorrien's later career. For eighteen years he taught at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, suffering the tragic loss of his beloved spouse Brenda Biggs. There he wrote the books that established his early prominence in social ethics and threw himself headlong against the invasion of Iraq. For nineteen years and counting he has taught at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York City.

Dorrien tells his story with the same stylish prose and attention to personalities that mark his many acclaimed works in social ethics, theology, and intellectual history. Over from Union Road is a luminous interpretation of our time through the life experience of an eminent scholar-activist.

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