"The New Abolition"

New from Yale University Press: The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel by Gary Dorrien.

About the book, from the publisher:

The black social gospel emerged from the trauma of Reconstruction to ask what a “new abolition” would require in American society. It became an important tradition of religious thought and resistance, helping to create an alternative public sphere of excluded voices and providing the intellectual underpinnings of the civil rights movement. This tradition has been seriously overlooked, despite its immense legacy.

In this groundbreaking work, Gary Dorrien describes the early history of the black social gospel from its nineteenth-century founding to its close association in the twentieth century with W. E. B. Du Bois. He offers a new perspective on modern Christianity and the civil rights era by delineating the tradition of social justice theology and activism that led to Martin Luther King Jr.

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. His many books range across the fields of ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, and history. His most recent book, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology, won the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers as the best book in Theology and Religious Studies of 2012.

--Marshal Zeringue