Organizing Visions: Social Ethics and Broad-Based Solidarity Activism

ETHICS AND INTERSECTIONALITY SERIES

While coming from varied backgrounds and experience, collectively the contributors to Organizing Visions offer a vital overview of the current state of Christian social ethics and its rich relation to organizing movements. Organizing Visions makes the case that Christian social ethics emerged out of and in conversation with major social movements in U.S. history and is defined today by a commitment to studying these movements to grasp where they may be going.

Contributors include the editors and:

Carolyn Baker, The General Baker Institute

Malinda Elizabeth Berry, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

K. B. Brower, Bargaining for the Common Good,

Action Center on Race & the Economy

Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Vanderbilt University

Nicholas Hayes-Mota, Santa Clara University

Peter Laarman, United Church of Christ minister; former executive director, Progressive Christians Uniting

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and

Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Christophe D. Ringer, Chicago Theological Seminary

C. Melissa Snarr, Vanderbilt University

Joseph Strife, formerly of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, NYC

Colleen Wessel-McCoy, Earlham School of Religion

Gary Dorrien teaches social ethics, theology, and philosophy of religion as the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. Dorrien is the author of 21 books and more than 300 articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. The third and concluding volume of Dorrien’s history of the Black social gospel tradition will be published by Yale University Press in 2023 under the title A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK. Dorrien is currently completing a single-volume history of American theological liberalism titled The Spirit of American Liberal Theology.

Charlene Sinclair has been a community organizer for over 20 years, working with national and local organizations to develop comprehensive grassroots organizing and political strategies as well as policy and power analysis. Charlene draws on this experience in her current role as lead organizer for what is being called one of the largest national coalition of grassroots organizations led by directly impacted leaders working to end mass incarceration and criminalization. Charlene received her PhD in Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Director of Online Learning and the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. His scholarly and organizing work lies at the intersection of the academy, the Christian church, and community organizing. An ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament in the PC(USA), Aaron most recently was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration, and climate change.