History as a practice examines the contingent. Everything that leaves evidence of having-happened might have happened otherwise, and nothing that has come to be except that it displaced other things that might have been. In the realm of Black religion in the United States, the what-if questions and counterfactuals wonder about a seventy-year-old Dr. King, to be sure, but they also wonder about the directions that theological and political and cultural movements took and what possibilities, lost to contingency, might be worth reclaiming. Such claims and counter-claims are the stuff of Dr. Gary Dorrien’s book A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK from Yale University Press, and Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome Dr. Dorrien back to the show.
