Why Does a Theologian Write a Memoir?

For many in the fields of theology, ethics, and social justice, Gary Dorrien is a giant.

A theologian, ethicist, professor, priest, and author, Dorrien has helped shape and excavate the overlap between social justice and faith for nearly 50 years. He has written definitively as a historian and prophetically as an activist, all while teaching generations as a professor of religion.

“Gary Dorrien is the greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century, our most compelling political theologian, and one of the most gifted historians of ideas in the world,” wrote professor and pastor Michael Eric Dyson.

But Dorrien, the Union Theological Seminary luminary, was first known for his stature in the exact opposite sense. A multisport athlete, Dorrien was nicknamed “Micro,” during his time as an amateur baseball pitcher, as he recounts in his new memoir Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

“It was a double-entendre marking the incongruity that the shorty who mixed electric fastballs and curveballs had stopped growing in the seventh grade,” he writes.

Dorrien never did continue into a professional career — sidetracked by an injury to his arm, he decided not to bother with rehab. Instead set himself on the path to becoming a multi-hyphenate academic. Dorrien has over two dozen books to his name, is ordained in the Episcopal Church, and teaches ethics at Union and religion at Columbia University.

In our interview, Dorrien spoke about the goal of memoirs, the work of pastors and organizers, and his long lunches with the father of Black liberation theology, James Cone.

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: Why does a theologian write a memoir?

Gary Dorrien: I think most theologians probably have knocking around their heads the influence of a memoir or two that had an influence upon them. The classic of this whole field, of course, is Augustine.

I have appreciated those folks who at least tried to write about themselves and their careers in ways that were somewhat introspective, somewhat self-conscious and self-critical. It usually means something when you come across someone who tries to do it and cannot.

I wrote this massive trilogy on liberalism some years ago; it’s in my head how grateful I was to Vergilius Ferm, who wrote two large volumes of what he called “theological autobiographies.” And I’ve written a great deal about Reinhold Niebuhr over the years. Niebuhr would be an example of someone who actually tried to write about himself a couple of times and simply couldn’t do it.

And yet, of course, he is, in his own very indirect way, writing about his story and himself all the time, but he can’t own up to it. That has long told me something significant about Niebuhr as well.

I suppose all of this is knocking around in my head for all those years. The trilogy on American theological liberalism, a book on evangelicalism, books on [Karl] Barth and a massive trilogy on the Black Social Gospel — through the course of writing all of that work, all of it would be poorer had there not been people who at least tried to say, “Here’s what I was trying to do, here’s how I understood who I was when I wrote this.”

You can’t always trust it. It’s not always true, what they write. But it’s always interesting, and you’re always learning something from the effort.

Is there a theological task to writing a memoir? Is there something that is being done besides giving an account of your own life?

Yes. The story about myself is secondary, or sometimes even less than secondary, in the memoir I wrote. I was really interested in telling a story about friends I have known, groups I’ve been involved in, and the intellectual trends of my time. Sometimes the important things are about myself and that might be some kind of an indication, some kind of a key hermeneutical something, that says something about all these books that I’ve written.

There are a couple of reviewers that said this kind of thing to me: “How come you go on about your wife’s sermons, but don’t describe your own?”

There was never a chance that I was going to start quoting my own sermons. And Brenda is — my middle chapters are really mostly about her and all that I’m learning about ministry through being involved with her. This is an “I-we-we-I” memoir. The two “we”s there — the other, and that I’m learning more about myself through others — is really always much more the point.

There’s a story about fusing things that are unusual — my involvement in theology and churches but also in democratic socialist movements, where I am very much an outlier in those spaces. I’m always trying to tell an intertwined story about various people, and myself, in the context of whatever social struggle I’m describing, or intellectual trend, or working at an institution or a church.

Was there anything in this book that you were hesitant to put on paper?

Oh, certainly. To say on the first page that I was a little guy who struggled with a strong temptation to throw himself in front of a train — that is not normal for a little 7-year-old. Immediately, something is being signaled here that that is going to show up later on. By the time you get to that end of that chapter, you’re seeing it [depression] already. Sports and autodidactic intellectualism and religion did carry me through my early life and yet, I ended up having an emotional breakdown that occurred shortly after I got to college.

To have to say that I struggled with brutal depression for my entire college experience — that is something that is hard to say about yourself. It’s hard for some of your loved ones to read.

One reason that it took me as long to write the memoir as it did was that things of that sort do occur to you — “It might not be time to even talk about any of that, yet.”

Even having to tell an honest story about being an organizer and a pastor — someone who pours himself out in national ministry — and yet, I am someone who is a shy loner. I am always having to overcome this introverted, loner self who’s not natural at all as a performer.

Here I am, still inflicting this shy, loner self on the public, and on congregations and ministry and so on. To have given readers a kind of a window into what that was like for me — I can’t tell my story without saying it.

Can you tell me a little bit more about being a pastor and an organizer? What were the similarities in those jobs?

Of course, I hadn’t joined a church yet when I moved to Albany, New York, with my beloved new wife, who was a pastor. I learned ministry from her.

I did organizing for years before [becoming a minister]. I’d been involved in organizing all through graduate school. The whole time I was at Harvard and Union and Princeton, I’d always been involved in DSOC — what later became Democratic Socialists of America — and Latin American solidarity organizing.

I came through that door. So, for me, the question then is going to be, Is the church even a site for being involved in movements for social justice? It’s years after that I finally decided, yes, the church can be — and it so often is! That’s part of what brought me into the church. In the 1980s, much of the Latin American solidarity organizing I’m doing is occurring in churches, including the sanctuary movement.

You wrote so much about sports in the opening chapter — I felt a little bit like a kindred spirit as someone called out of a career in sports and into journalism. What did sports teach you in your youth?

Firstly, it’s something outside this rural, trailer-park, dirt-road life that I have in Bay County, Mich. The first time my father left my mother at home and took me instead to watch the Midland Chemics play football — Oh, my goodness! It’s just like the world just opened up. Picturing myself, 10 years forward, that I could be playing quarterback for the Midland Chemics, that was just a spectacle to me that immediately was a draw.

Even though I only succeeded about once a week, it was always on me to round up this group of guys to get a baseball game going. The camaraderie, the sheer love, the enjoyment of playing together, to me was an experience of transcendence — of being together in a way that’s meaningful.

And underneath it all was that this was how I forged a relationship with my father, since, to have a relationship with him, you had to chase him down and take up his preoccupations, his love, which all revolved around athletics.

I followed him out to the golf course and watched football with him and took up all of his athletic interests — it was also connection to my father.

Are you still a sports person? Do you find any significance in sports at all now?

Oh yeah. In graduate school, I was at Harvard at the time, I took up running as a substitute for all these sports I played, and I’ve been bounding out there ever since.

For many years, I ran 10 miles a day, six times a week, in an hour. So, you know, 6-minute miles. I tore up my ankles and knees doing it. And yet I’ve done it my whole life and always regarded the physical toll as totally worth it. Sunrise running, first thing in the morning, just felt as natural as breathing.

All this bounding did take a toll. I’m a mere jogger by the time I’m in my mid-40s and yet I’ve sustained it to today. I never went back to any kind of organized sports. As a person who is so deeply involved in filling his whole days with scholarship and activism and relationships, it’s not like I’ve got time to join a softball league. But running has been essential to my being and well-being for my whole life after I reached graduate school and was no longer involved in organized sports.

Turning to our political moment — we’re two months into a second Trump presidency; we feel closer to fascist state than we have in my lifetime. What are the lessons from the past that you feel we should draw on for today?

Firstly, I have to say that I recognize that the strategy of social change that I’ve been working with for many years does not apply to this moment.

The strategy of social change — from the time I joined DSOC in the fall of 1974, met Michael Harrington, and was involved in his organizations through those years — is not in play right now.

The argument there is that we can only make breakthroughs for gains — toward universal health care; solidarity wages, or at least a living wage; a new voting rights act; saving the planet — in moments of liberal ascension, in alliance with mass movements.

In 2009-10, I was very much involved in the single-payer movement, thinking, “Maybe we’ve got a shot at it right now.” And now we’re in a moment where movements of that sort are battered and in retreat. And not just here in the U.S. — pretty much everywhere you look.

Let’s end here: The two Jameses influencing your life have been James Cone and James Baldwin. Which are your favorite books from each?

Certainly, to have read [Baldwin’s] The Fire Next Time in high school — I’ve read all this Martin Luther King Jr. material, and I’m very much up to date on that. [I’m asking,] What’s next? That book was such a sensation. It’s a book that just seared in my heart.

With Jim [Cone], the one that sticks out, of course, is the one I worked with him on — The Cross and the Lynching Tree.

I lived with him through that whole long period of torturing that book out of his head and psyche. And it is his best. It was by far his best book, I think. To that point, it was his own favorite book of his own.

To have lived with it, with him, for years — we’d start out having lunch and we’re still sitting there at dinnertime and just chewing it over. And, of course, Jim was someone who just loved to tell these stories about his life. In many ways, that was the most extraordinary experience of my life, just living with him through that.