Abstract
This is a big book, not just in its length but in its ambition and complexity. Professor Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Neibuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. In this, his most recent book, he is writing for the first time as an Anglican about his own religious adherence. He seeks to delineate the history and enduring characteristics of Anglican theology from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century English Reformation to the 1980s, attentive to its “royal absolutism, racism, and imperialism” (xii). He finds its characteristics to be a particular emphasis on God’s Word (Logos) incarnate in Jesus Christ, an imperially based racist orientation to whiteness, and, at odds with that, an inherent “ecumenism.” Professor Dorrien does not seem to define what he means by using this anachronism of “ecumenism” for the earlier centuries of Anglicanism, but he does refer to tracking...