Two by William Sloane Coffin

The books of his I recently read are "Credo" (2003) and "Letters to A Young Doubter" (2005), the last published major works by the former Yale University chaplain, and later pastor of the Riverside Church of New York. (He died in April of 2006, age 81.)

There's a school of thought that sometimes noted religious figures are hard to distinguish from politicans. (Or maybe we just define public people by politics unless they have a lot of money or sing or act or make jokes for a living. ) I suppose Coffin stood on the Left of the political spectrum. Well left. He went to jail because he opposed the Vietnam War, and just about every other war the USA has been worked up into. (He did support American intervention in Bosnia and, unlike some peace activists, had little taste for defending regimes just because they happened to be anti-American.)

People who are Christian tend to fall into the catagories people call fundementalist or liberal. This can be misleading I think because Christianity has both conservative and liberal (and socialist) elements mixed together. The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis thought that a ideal Christian society would be both conservative in character and socialistic economically. Since nothing like that seems likely to even happen in a major politcal movement, much less a governing body, it becomes even more clear that no political sect can get a monopoly on Scripture.

Most people who know of Reverend Coffin probably first heard of him in connection to Civil Rights and his opposition to the Vietnam War or for advocating a nuclear freeze during the Cold War. He once said: "Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality."

He was an activist's activist and part of the experience of reading his reflections for me was that they reflected on me as to how little I have ever done to stand up personally for any cause. My frame of mind is more ironic that idealistic, more interested in making a joke than stating a public opinion on my own two feet. I suppose that of my admiration for Coffin and others comes from the realizaton that people like Coffin provide a mental measuring stick for readers like myself to remember we are part of a greater community and sometimes sacrifice of some sort is the only response to emergencies or injustices.

Anyway, an activist he was and I isn't.

What surprised me was that Coffin himself had served in World War II as a first lieutenant in France and Germany in 1944-45 and, because of his knowledge of Russian--acquired during his university and military officer training, not in Russia--he worked as a translator for the Army during the tense post- war years in Central Europe. What was even more surprising to me was that he later served in the CIA for three years into the 1950's. Whatever can be said for his political opinions, no critic can say they weren't hard won.

Both "Credo" and "Letters to a Young Doubter" cover a good deal more ground than the political, although it is there and admirers of President Bush will probably not bother going through the books to get at the nuggets of wisdom given the man's reputation. What made the books worth reading for me was not that they told me of opinions I already shared of powerful and privledged officals, but that they were written in a style that brought forth Rev. Coffin's entire life experience, the personal and the political, and showed often that he had as much love and patience as he did opinions about current events. A quote from "Letters":"There are two ways, my friend, that you can be rich in life. One is to make a lot of money and the other is to have few needs."

In this time of great civil dissention, it was nice to read a man who has seen a lot of life share his wisdom without feeling like he was simply waging old battles. He wasn't forgetting them, but he is also an intellectual engaging readers to think for themselves and not regard faith as the enemy of sound thinking (as some articulate but narrow-focused intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins would have us believe).

For more about Rev. Coffin:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week752/profile.html