Gary Dorrien came to organizing the hard way — canvassing for McGovern in Alma, Michigan in 1972, where people didn’t just oppose the candidate, they despised him, and where two doorstep encounters came close enough to violence that he learned the hard way to pair up. He didn’t come out of that thinking he’d found his calling. What he found instead was Michael Harrington at a Harvard Divinity School lecture two years later — corduroy jacket, blue work shirt, gently correcting his own introduction — and joined DSOC on the spot. This week’s session gave us Gary’s full origin story as an organizer: from the McGovern campaign to the Albany years where he co-founded a DSOC chapter, led Central American solidarity work through C-SPACE, and discovered firsthand the cultural chasm between two wings of the left that could barely stand to share a building. Then Aaron took over and introduced three extraordinary guests — Joe Strife, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Carolyn Baker — who brought the history of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Beulah Sanders, and the General Baker Institute directly into the room, and turned the question of who should lead into a live theological reckoning. Carolyn did the interview sitting on her mother’s childhood porch steps in Dallas, recording oral history from a woman who is still organizing through dementia, which tells you everything you need to know about where this tradition lives and who carries it.

If you haven’t joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Next week: James Cone with Charlene Sinclair.

Colleen Wessel-McCoy specializes in Christian social ethics with particular attention to the role of religion in US social movements. She is author of Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign (Lexington, 2021), an examination of King’s theo-ethical and political vision for his last campaign. Before coming to Earlham School of Religion, she was Neely Visiting Professor of Religion and Public Policy at Arizona State and a lecturer at Union Theological Seminary in theology and field education. She has been part of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, was a national educator with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and is an interim co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union. Her current research focuses on the leadership of the National Welfare Rights Organization of the 1960s and 70s.

Joe Strife is a scholar working at the intersection of church, charity, and social justice. His research focuses on the role of faith-based organizations in fighting poverty. For years he served as a community organizer in Philadelphia with organizations including the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, and the Simple Way. He received his PhD from Union Theological Seminary and teaches at Fordham University.

Carolyn Baker is an educator, organizer, and co-founder and director of the General Baker Institute in Detroit, Michigan. The Institute is a movement incubator that includes educational programming, a community center, print shop, Ghetto Coffee Shoppe, and community garden. They are fully rooted in Detroit but share an internationalist vision with their movement comrades across the world. They are partners in the ongoing activism around racist policing, hosting teach-ins that bring together emerging leaders with movement elders from Detroit’s long history of anti-racist labor and human rights organizing. The Institute follows the legacy and insight of General Baker of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in saying, “we must turn fighters into thinkers and thinkers into fighters.”

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp