For wide-ranging discussions of the Second Vatican Council, see the new 800-page Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, edited by Catherine E. Clifford and Massimo Faggioli (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Disclosure: In the fall semester of 1964, I took my first course from Ong at Saint Louis University. In the fall semester of 1964, I heard Dr. King speak at Saint Louis University on October 14, 1964. According to the report in the student newspaper, King delivered an address titled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." I also heard King speak in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965.
In Dorrien's book 2018 book Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press), discussed below, he discusses the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in the subsection "Selma" in Chapter Six: "Nightmare Fury and Public Sacrifice" (pp. 376-386).
In Dorrien's opening sentence of Chapter Six in his 2018 book, he says, "King was more angry and radical in 1960 than in 1955 [at the beginning of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama], more angry and radical in 1965 than in 1960" (p. 355) - and therefore probably more angry and radical when I heard him speak in Montgomery on March 25, 1965, than he was on October 14, 1964, when I heard him speak on the campus of Saint louis University.
In Dorrien's last sentence in Chapter Six in his 2018 book, he says, "And then he grew more truly radical" (p. 354) - most notably in his criticism of the Vietnam War. After years of preaching and practicing the philosophy of nonviolence in the South, it was surely logically consistent for King to come out against the Vietnam War. However, he did not bring himself to do this quickly. Fortunately for me, I received draft deferments, and so I was not called up for military service in the Vietnam War. Instead, I participated in local and regional antiwar marches.
In any event, I was inspired by King to devote ten years of my life to teaching writing (1969-1979) to about one thousand black inner-city youth, and about one thousand white youth, in the context of open admissions in the City of St. Louis and in New York City -- and I was inspired by Ong's work to see black inner-city youth in the City of St. Louis and in New York City as coming from a residually oral cultural background.
In the present context, I would suggest that the black social gospel tradition in which King grew up and was groomed represents certain strengths of a residually oral cultural background. In contrast, in my estimate, the white social gospel tradition in the United States does not represent the oral-aural strengths characteristic of the black social tradition in the United States.
In my years in the Jesuit order (1979-1986), I studied theology a wee bit at the Jesuit theologate at the University of Toronto - which is why I am interested in King's personalist theology and in the black social gospel and in the white social gospel as well as certain developments in the Roman Catholic Church that I mention in the present review essay.
Incidentally, according to the "Source Notes" in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson (Hachette Book Group, 1998, pp. 371-390), King delivered the sermon titled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968 (p. 379). King's "Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March" on March 25, 1965, is published in the book A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (Hachette Book Group 2001, pp. 119-132), with an "Introduction" by Representative John Lewis (pp. 111-117). It is also published as "Our God is Marching On!" in the 700-page book A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (Harper & Row, 1986, pp. 227-230). End of disclosure.
Now, subsequently, the prolific Dorrien published Kantian Reason and the Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent (Baylor University Press, 2020).
Dorrien revisits white American Protestant liberal theology in his new book The Spirit of American Liberal Theology: A History (John Knox, 2023).
The prolific Dorrien is also the author of the recent trilogy about black American Protestant social gospel, published by Yale University Press:
(1) The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (2015);
(2) Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (2017);
(3) A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK (2023).
No doubt the white scholar Dorrien is qualified to write a trilogy of books about the black social gospel.
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