social gospel
Walter Earl Fluker’s call to the Black church
In King’s time, the goal was to stir the churches to struggle. Now it’s to wake the dead.
Walter Rauschenbusch then and now
William Pitts examines the era when the Social Gospel was new—and controversial.
How American Protestant missionaries helped usher in post-Protestant America
David Hollinger shows how the social gospel principles that drove mission abroad boomeranged back home.
The black social gospel and the civil rights movement
Gary Dorrien chronicles the influential—but often forgotten—work of Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, and Howard Thurman.
by John Fea
Take & Read: American religious history
Grant Wacker recommends the best recently published books in his field.
selected by Grant Wacker
Woodrow Wilson’s troubling faith
Wilson adopted a brand of social Christianity that justified white supremacy and more.
#Blessed
Will young men and women from middle and lower class backgrounds be pushed down with medical and educational debt? Will they see the military as the only option for education, health, and opportunity?
"The 'social gospel' of the Methodist tradition"
National Public Radio just ran a pair of features on the flavors of Christianity represented by the presidential and vice presidential nominees. An editor’s note affixed to both stories summarizes the theme: “Both major presidential candidates this year are Protestants… Beyond that, their faith profiles are very different.”
The church's respectability politics: Black Lives Matter symposium
The young people leading this movement have heard enough about Martin Luther King's dream. It is not enough for church leaders to reply that they don't know much history.
by Gary Dorrien
The black social gospel
In American history, some lives have mattered; others have not. That difference fundamentally has been a racial one.
by Paul Harvey
Capitalism and faith: A tangled history
Why have American Christians so readily baptized the idea of free-market capitalism? Kevin Kruse illuminates the long, tangled history.
Working-class Christians
According to Heath Carter, working people have been some of Christianity's most important theological innovators.
Unintended aid: Resident Aliens at 25
Denigrating "social activist churches" was central to Hauerwas and Willimon's agenda. Yet Resident Aliens revived social gospel arguments.
by Gary Dorrien
A plea to Wiki
Like it or not, Wikipedia is here and it will probably stay. Everybody from third grade history students to graduate level scholars use them. Even when Wiki pages cannot be cited, we still use them. We are forming history on that site.
The liberal fundamentalist
One hundred years ago this summer, a fundamentalist Christian stood before the convention of a major political party and offered an impromptu resolution. He ended his impassioned speech by quoting words of Jesus. The speech was not what you might expect.
Financial collapse: Lessons from the Social Gospel
The current meltdown is just a bigger version of the dot-com bust of the 1990s, with the usual lessons about financial bubbles. But this crisis is harder to swallow, because it starts with people who were just trying to buy a house, who usually had no understanding of predatory lending or derivatives schemes. It was a mystery how the banks did it, but you trusted that they knew what they were doing. Your bank resold the mortgage to an aggregator who bunched it up with thousands of other subprime mortgages, chopped the package into small pieces, and sold them as corporate bonds to parties looking for extra yield. Your mortgage payments paid for the interest on the bonds.