Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr: 1924-2006

"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."

Comments (13)

1. I guess he meant a lot to previous generations, but I don't really know much about the man. Good to see that he had a nice long life with a positive impact, though.

   Posted by ILOVEPHYSICS at 04/13/2006 @ 11:09am

2. Thank you, Katrina. Well said. Ron Barkby

   Posted by Barkby at 04/13/2006 @ 11:56am

3. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.

   He will be missed, but he did all he could for as long as he could. For that, he should hold a special place in everyone's heart and/or mind.

   Posted by AmeriPundit at 04/13/2006 @ 11:57am

4. ZERO

   Students for a Free Tibet has posted a list of Google alternatives at http://noluv4google.com/article.php?id=800

   Ironically enough, I found this via a Google search (talk about capitalists making the ropes!)

   Posted by brunowe at 04/13/2006 @ 12:57pm

5. Thank you for this tribute. Coffin's influence on my generation was great, and we persevere in working on the same issues year after year because of his example. Progressive Americans will miss his voice.

   Posted by Gary L. Harke at 04/13/2006 @ 2:36pm

6. Beautiful eulogy Katrina. Now we more fully share, still to only an extent, your/our grief.

   Sail hither and yon, fair soul of Sloan.

   Lew

   Posted by lewwelge at 04/13/2006 @ 3:44pm

7. I was a grad student at Yale when Bill Coffin was chaplain, and we traveled in different circles -- I in the streets and neighborhoods of New Haven, he in Battell Chapel. But it was hard not to respect the path he trod, particularly at mandarin Yale. He was indeed a man of principle.

   He did good, far more than most. Thanks, Bill.

   Posted by askay at 04/13/2006 @ 4:29pm

8. "Where are their counterparts now?" They are all over the country, lots of "little people" of conscience standing up "against the Pharaoh". They're not on the front page of the daily papers like Dr. Spock, Rev. Coffin, Dr. King., but they are out there every week working from little storefronts of "social justice centers", or at weekly vigils for peace in front of state capitols, or town greens, or managing websites filled with information about vigils, films, lectures, marches, strikes, memorials -- they (We!) are everywhere: women, men, young, old, doing whatever little bit we can, but inspired by the greats, like Rev. Coffin, or Bella, or Coretta & Martin King, or whoever our personal heroes are. The greatness of "the '60s" is that it has been "atomized" & sprayed all over the country, not just concentrated in NYC or DC or Chicago, but everywhere in America. Let's keep it going, as he would have encouraged us to do. Peace, DWx

   Posted by dwlcx at 04/13/2006 @ 7:31pm

9. Thanks, Katrina, for a lovely tribute to our hero. And friend.

   Posted by alstyron at 04/13/2006 @ 10:47pm

10. Obituaries of Bill Coffin, in The Nation, The Times and elsewhere, focus on his social activism -- which is all well and good. But those of us who had the good fortune to know Bill Coffin understand that he was first a minister of the Christian gospel. He was not a social activist who sought an institutional religious gloss for his politics. His understanding of God was central. This is important to remember today as mainstream liberal Christians are marginalized in the popular imagination. Bill Coffin was a committed Christian whose reading of scripture led him to advocacy for the marginalized and against war. What better model could we ask for today?

    Posted by petersonny at 04/13/2006 @ 11:28pm

11. Reverend Bill Coffin changed a lot of lives in the Civil Rights movement. I was honored to walk with him and Martin Luther King and to learn that "Not to take sides is effectively to weigh in on the side of the stronger."

    In jail he sang songs to us, to lift our spirits and reminded us that we were beyond the kicks, beatings, cigarette burns, and abuse given to all objecting to the injustices in the laws covering African Americans, the poor, and women.

    In his book, "Credo", he states that "Compassion and justice are companions, not choices." More Americans need to read his works and words of wisdom. I suggest all readers buy a copy of "Credo" to read to fully understand his lasting gift to us and what every American should strive to be. We need his guidance now more than ever.

    America is diminished by the loss of this very great and special man. I grieve.

    Posted by Nancy H at 04/14/2006 @ 08:44am

12. This is an interesting thread. It leads to what I've come to perceive as the profound moral confuson on the left, best embodied by a very odd bumper sticker: "Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism."

    Can anyone here name a slightly higher form? And mean it?

    Posted by paulchap at 04/14/2006 @ 1:06pm

13. Hey!

    I couldn't help but noticing the Google ad for a breast-pump on The Nation's pages...

    How ironic. You just can't get weened, can you?

    Posted by TheBigDee at 04/19/2006 @ 09:46am