William Sloane Coffin offers here a powerful antidote to the politics of the religious right with a clarion call to passive intellectuals and dispirited liberals to reenter the fray with an unabashedly Christian view of social justice. Refusing to cede the battlefield of morality to conservatives, he argues that “compassion demands confrontation,” as he considers such topics as homophobia, diversity, nuclear weapons, and civil discourse.

No stranger to controversy, Coffin became famous while chaplain at Yale in the 1960s for his active opposition to the Vietnam War. Jailed as a civil rights “Freedom Rider,” indicted by the government in the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial, he attained popular immortality as Reverend Sloan in the Doonesbury comic strip. Now in his 70s and retired as pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, Coffin has lost neither his fire nor his wit. The seven pieces collected here are peppered with memorable aphorisms and pithy, political one-liners meant to turn bitterness to anger and anger to action. “I stress anger because the country as a whole is despiritualized by moral lassitude,” he writes. “Having gotten used to genocidal weapons, are we now going to get used to starving children?”

Unafraid to call himself a Christian, Coffin reclaims Jesus and the Bible from religious fundamentalists in his call for liberalism and justice. The “simplicity, beauty, and difficulty of Jesus’ message” informs much of Coffin’s thinking as he strives to restore spirituality to intellectual life. Politics and religion, long taboo at polite dinner parties, are powerfully reunited here.

“The temptation is real to think that an issue is less spiritual for being more political. The temptation is real to believe that religion is above politics, that the sanctuary is too sacred a place for the grit and grime of political battle. But if you believe religion is above politics, you are, in actuality, for the status quo—a very political position. And were God the god of the status quo, then the church would have no prophetic role, serving the state mainly as a kind of ambulance service.”

“It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to open one. God leads with a light rein, giving us our head. Jesus spoke in parables because these stories have a way of shifting responsibility from the narrator to the hearer. Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word—to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.”

WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN served for 18 years as chaplain of Yale University, was senior minister of Riverside Church, and is president emeritus of SANE/FREEZE: Campaign for Global Security. His books include Once to Every Man: An Autobiography, The Courage to Love, Living the Truth in a World of Illusions, and A Passion for the Possible.