Letters to a Young Doubter - Hardcover

Coffin, William Sloane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0664229298 ISBN 13: 9780664229290

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005

About this title

About the Author

William Sloane Coffin served as chaplain of Yale University and Williams College, was senior minister of Riverside Church, and is President Emeritus of SANE/FREEZE: Campaign for Global Security. He became famous while at Yale in the 1960s for his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was jailed as a civil rights Freedom Rider, indicted by the U.S. government in the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial, and has been immortalized as Rev. Sloan in the Doonesbury comic strip. Both Union Theological Seminary in New York and Yale University have established scholarships in his honor.Included in his works are Credo and A Passion for the Possible, both available from WJK.

From the Back Cover

"Humorous, eloquent, righteously indignant, and ruefully wise, this book is suffused with Coffin's special tone: a mix of high moral expectation and love of humanity in all its incompletions and imperfections. It's excellent that he, who inspired so many of the young in the Civil Rights Movement and related causes in the last century, should begin a new century with a new address to the young." Richard H. Brodhead, President, Duke University

"Not only a fiery preacher and a social prophet, Bill Coffin is also a wise observer of life, and as he has grown older his wisdom and counsel like a fine wine have become ever more valuable. These letters can and should be placed in the hands of anyone young or old who has ever entertained doubts. And that means all of us." Harvey Cox, author of When Jesus Came to Harvard

Reviews

Modeled after Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Coffin's year-long correspondence with an imagined college student, Tom, offers insights from the fund of wisdom Coffin has collected over the years. Former senior minister at Riverside Church, chaplain at Yale during the turbulent 1960s, civil rights Freedom Rider, and president emeritus of the anti-nuclear weapons movement SANE/FREEZE, Coffin has made a career of asking hard questions of the Christian faith while courageously bringing the demands of social justice to the center of it. Over the course of the academic year, Coffin counsels Tom on matters of sexuality, grades, grief, narcissism and humility, war and the draft, and prayer. In almost every letter, Coffin finds a moment to quote a passage from writers such as Dostoevsky, Auden, Shaw or Melville. It's always unfortunate in collections of this sort that we only get one side of the correspondence, for Tom is little more than a mouthpiece for Coffin's own concerns. In that sense, the letters offer little that is fresh from Coffin. Despite the book's artificial form, however, there is no finer mind on these matters than Coffin's. His letters demonstrate that doubt plays an integral role in a strong and flourishing faith.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0664229298
• ISBN 13: 9780664229290
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200