Christian ethicist Donald W. Shriver Jr. dies at 93

Donald W. Shriver Jr., an acclaimed Christian ethicist and Presbyterian minister who wrote widely about the need for White Americans to face and repent of their racist past, died July 28 at 93.

Shriver served as president of Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1975 to 1991 and is credited with hiring leading Black scholars and clergy, including James Forbes, James Washington, and Cornel West. West once called Shriver “the most prophetic seminary president in the late 20th century.”

A son of the South, born in Norfolk, Virginia, Shriver took to heart Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and its call to White clergy. Shriver’s most celebrated book, Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds, published in 2005, compared the work of public repentance in Germany and in South Africa with that of the United States.