[Oe List ...] FW: Remembering William Sloane Coffin

[Herman Greene]

Reverend William Sloane Coffin died Wednesday at the age of 81.

Bill Coffin, as his friends knew him, was one of recent America's greatest
and most eloquent prophetic voices. For more than forty years, his
passionate calls for peace, social justice, civil rights, and an end to
nuclear insanity challenged this nation's conscience. Read a short
appreciation of Coffin's life and work by Nation editor Katrina vanden
Heuvel.

And read Dan Wakefield's piece in the recent issue of The Nation remembering
Coffin's accomplishments--and those of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Father
Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Heschel--in battling racism, unjust war,
nuclear proliferation, poverty and threats to civil liberties.

Wakefield's article was drawn from his new book, The Hijacking of Jesus,
which traces how the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount has in
effect been hijacked by right-wingers and the Republican Party.



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This is Katrina's article. You might try Wakefield's piece & book web ---

      Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr: 1924-2006
      Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      "Clearly the trick in life is to die young as late as possible,"
Reverend William Sloane Coffin From his last book, Credo.

      Reverend William Sloane Coffin died Wednesday at the age of 81.

      Bill Coffin, as his friends knew him, was one of our greatest and most
eloquent prophetic voices. For more than forty years, his passionate calls
for peace, social justice, civil rights, and an end to nuclear insanity
challenged this nation's conscience.

      While Chaplain of Yale University in the 1960s, Coffin emerged as an
indomitable opponent of the Vietnam War. A leader of the draft resistance
movement, a proponent of civil disobedience, Coffin and four other antiwar
activists (including Dr. Benjamin Spock) challenged provisions of the
Selective Service Act. Tried in 1968, Coffin, Dr. Spock and two of the other
three were convicted of conspiracy, but the verdicts were overturned on
appeal. In 1978, Coffin was called to the very visible pulpit of Riverside
Church and as its Minister led the church into the center of the antinuclear
movement. (He was also immortalized as the offbeat Rev. Scot Sloan in
Doonesbury. )Though slowed by a stroke he suffered in 1999, Coffin spoke out
against the Iraq war and, just last October, he founded a religious
organization calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

      Over the years, Coffin contributed to The Nation. Occasionally, he'd
call to propose an idea or offer a perspective on events gripping his
imagination. He knew I spoke some Russian so he'd playfully use
his--acquired during World War II when he entered a Russian language program
in military intelligence. Because of his facility with languages, Coffin was
made a liaison to the Russian army and, in 1946, he took part in operations
to forcibly repatriate Soviet citizens who had been taken prisoner. He
forever repented for this episode, writing in his memoir that it "left me a
burden of guilt, I am sure to carry the rest of my life." That burden, he
later said, influenced his decision to spend three years in the CIA opposing
Stalin's regime. But Coffin was quick to tell you that while he was
anti-Soviet he was also very 'pro-Russian."

      I have a vivid memory of Coffin, when he officiated at my wedding in
1988, singing along with a mournful Russian ballad we chose to play--a song
written by a man whose father and other family members had either perished
or spent years in Stalin's gulag.

      A few years ago, James Carroll wrote of Coffin's gospel, "...What a
gospel it was. The world he described was upside-down; the church on the
side of the poor; the powerful at risk for losing everything; the
disenfranchised as sole custodians of moral legitimacy. Coffin, in his
passionate sermon that day, was perhaps the first person from which you
heard that defining question: Whose side are you on?"

      In our latest issue Dan Wakefield remembers Coffin's work --and that
of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Father Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham
Heschel--in battling racism, unjust war, nuclear proliferation, poverty and
threats to civil liberties. "Their inspiring example, " Wakefield writes,
"raises a disturbing question: Where are their counterparts now?"

      In these last months, Wakefield traveled around the country putting
that question to religious leaders and lay people, "trying to understand
what has brought us to the political-religious crisis of our time and what,
if anything, is being done about it." When Wakefield asks "who is the
contemporary equivalent of Coffin...several mainline Christians sighed and
said. 'Well, I guess--Coffin."

      Bill Coffin's great friend Cora Weiss called Wednesday night. Cora was
Bill's closest ally in all of the important struggles for peace and social
justice in these last years. "I called Bill a few days ago to read him
Wakefield's piece over the phone. The whole thing. At the end, I said,
'Bill, you can't go. Dan Wakefield says there's no one to replace you."
Coffin told Cora, "He'll find out soon enough," intimating, for the first
time Cora says, that he was beginning to fade. But, as she
reminds,"conscience never stops."

      Nor do the lessons of a man who was full of wit, fire, passion, joy,
courage and commitment as he preached and worked to better the world. " I
like to believe that I am an American patriot who loves his country enough
to address her flaws," Coffin wrote in the introduction to his last book.
"Today these are many and all the preachers worth their salt need fearlessly
to insist that 'God'n' country' is not one word."



Coffin was one of my favorite speakers & authors. He was a very good man.

Bob
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