Credo - Hardcover

William Sloane Coffin; James Carroll

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0664227074 ISBN 13: 9780664227074

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004

Synopsis

William Sloane Coffin challenged the nation with his passionate calls for social justice. In this best-seller, Coffin gives a powerful record of his remarkable public life, offering his inspiring words on issues ranging from charity and justice to politics and the meaning of faith.

About this title

Review

This collection of inspiring credos by William Sloane Coffin melds Christian spirit with social justice. Coffin's credentials are impressive--he served as chaplain of Yale University and Williams College, and he is the inspiration for the character Rev. Sloan in the Doonesbury comic strip. He is also a lifelong social crusader and peace activist. In James Carroll's exquisite introduction he recalls a night in 1972 when he and Coffin and numerous other ministers were thrown in jail for trespassing at the U.S. Capitol (while protesting the war in Vietnam). It was Coffin's baritone voice that broke the jailhouse silence, singing out Handel's "Messiah" and comforting the frightened men of the cloth. In fact, Coffin, author of The Heart is a Little to the Left has never been afraid to speak or sing out his beliefs. "I like to believe that I am an American patriot who loves his country enough to address her flaws," he states in the preface. "Today these are many, and all preachers worth their salt need fearlessly to insist that 'God 'n' Country' is not one word."

Editor Stephanie Egnotovich reviewed a lifetime of Coffin's sermons and unpublished speeches and then excerpted and organized them into categories. His words and her editing created a book that is full of quotables. For example:

On Social Justice and Economic Rights: "In the United States grim poverty is a tragedy that great wealth makes a sin."

On Social Justice and Civil Liberties: "Prejudice disfigures the observer, not the person observed. If only the latter could remember it."

On Patriotism: "All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality."

On War and Peace: "We are beginning to resemble extinct dinosaurs who suffered from too much armor and too little brain."

For the leftist leaning Christian, this is the book you'll want to take on your next spiritual retreat, political protest, or any situation where left-leaning Christians gather to create social change. And when it's not being carted around in a satchel, it deserves a permanent residence on your lifelong spiritual contemplations bookshelf. --Gail Hudson

From the Publisher

Recently, Bill Coffin has appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers and numberous NPR programs across the country, as well as been interviewed or reviewed in the Boston Globe, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Christian Century, The Bloomsbury Review, and The New York Times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0664227074
• ISBN 13: 9780664227074
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176