William Sloane Coffin

Reverend William Sloane Coffin was a political activist, a scholar, and a minister. He passed away last week and countless articles have been written about him. He seemed a noble man that fought against the injustices of his time. A peace activist during the Vietnam War and a civil rights activist during the 60s, Coffin preached a religion that I could believe. Quotes from the NPR story:

My view of the faith is it should make it possible for you to live with uncertainty.

The integrity of love is much more important than the impurity of dogma. You'll find that those who are really law and order Christians are more impressed with God's power than they are with God's love.

The cruelty that fundamentalists as a rule show to homosexuals is to me quite abhorrent. I also think they are quite ignorant. I know the Bible as well as they do. Maybe there's more to be learned than what's to be found in one or two Biblical passages.

People have some very goofy ideas about how the will of God operates. People think that God goes around the world with fingers on triggers, His hands on steering wheels...People say how can God let that happen? God is not in the event but in the response to the event.

We really do have free will. You have to have freedom if love's the name of the game. To blame God with what people do with their freedom is not fair....You can blame God for giving us human freedom, maybe we're not ready....It seems to be about where the blame stops.

I can't bear to be bored and I think a lot of the people that live safe, sterile lives are bored to death. Oliver Wendell Holmes: "If you do not share in the action and passion of your times you must count yourself as not having lived."

From Scotty McLennan's Boston Globe piece:

Coffin's contention was: ''Many of us are eager to respond to injustice, as long as we can do so without having to confront the causes of it. There's the great pitfall of charity. Handouts to needy individuals are genuine, necessary responses to injustice, but they do not necessarily face the reason for injustice. And that is why so many business and governmental leaders today are promoting charity; it is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity is based on growing inequality. First these leaders proclaim themselves experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the economy! Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church, finally telling us troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we blessed the battleships."

• New York Times Obituary
• Boston Globe article (by Stanford Dean of Religious Life, who in conjunction with Coffin is the inspiration for the Rev. Scotty Sloan in Doonesbury)
• Wikipedia article
• NPR Story