He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 25 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.

[6] Prior to joining the faculty at Union and Columbia in 2005, Dorrien taught at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he served as Parfet Distinguished Professor and as Dean of Stetson Chapel.

[6] An Episcopal priest, he has taught as the Paul E. Raither Distinguished Scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the Horace De Y. Lentz Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Lowell Visiting Professor at Boston University School of Theology.

[8] Born on March 21, 1952,[2][9] Dorrien grew up in a working class, semi-rural area of middle-Michigan, Bay County, and in nearby Midland, Michigan.

American Democratic Socialism will be the definitive history for some time.”[22][23] He won the Gandhi King Mandela Peace Prize in 2024 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia; the prize citation commended his “distinguished teaching and magisterial, rigorous, monumental, and definitive scholarship that counter and disrupt White racist theology and ethical inquiry by centering the truths of Black life, Black Christian witness, and political imagination.”[24][25]