Gary Dorrien wins award for book on black Social Gospel

Gary Dorrien, professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, won the 2017 Grawe­meyer Award in religion for his book The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel.

The award honoring “creative and significant insights into the relationship between human beings and the Divine” is given annually by the Louisville Pres­by­terian Theological Seminary and the University of Louis­ville. The prize is one of five given in different fields and in­cludes $100,000. Re­cip­ients will give free lectures in Louisville, Kentucky, in April.

“There is something new that started in the 1880s with the Social Gospel,” Dorrien said in 2009 in an interview with Bill Moyers. “You have a sociological consciousness itself that there’s such a thing as social structure.”