Geography of Faith

Daniel Berrigan, Robert Coles

Description

A classic of faith-based activism―updated for a new generation.
Why was Daniel Berrigan wanted by the FBI? Why did Robert Coles harbor a fugitive?
Listen in to the conversations between these two great teachers as they struggle with what it means to put your faith to the test. Discover how their story of challenging the status quo during a time of great political, religious, and social change is just as applicable to our lives today.
Thirty years ago, at the height of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, was wanted by the FBI for his nonviolent protest activities. He hid in the house of Robert Coles, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize. The two began a dialogue that encompasses a fascinating range of topics, from war, psychology, and violence, to social institutions, compassion, activism, and family life.
With this expanded, anniversary edition of a classic, new generations of readers can examine for themselves how spirituality is not only for ourselves, but often demands action and personal risk in the public arena.
New to this edition, Robert Coles offers historical perspective on this turbulent time and assesses the progress of faith-based activism in the years since. Daniel Berrigan challenges today’s activists in a new afterword.
Finally, a glossary of terms helps to clarify the key people, places, and movements that are often the subject of the Coles/Berrigan conversations.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Robert Coles
• State
• Politics
• Daniel Berrigan
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 août 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594735639
• Langue: English

Extrait

the geography of faith
the geography of faith
underground conversations on religious, political and social change
DANIEL BERRIGAN ROBERT COLES

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We dedicated this book in 1971 to the children of North Vietnam and South Vietnam, then enduring a terrible war; and now we reach out to children all over the world- their lives, we earnestly hope, full of expectation and promise .
Contents
Introduction to the 2001 edition by Robert Coles
Introduction to the 1971 edition by Robert Coles
Families
Pride and Violence
At the Edge
Compassionate Man and Political Man
Professional Life
Inside and Outside the Church
Twice-Born Men
Afterword by Daniel Berrigan
Glossary of Terms, Movements, and Names
About the Authors
Copyright
Also Available
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Daniel Berrigan in 1971
(photo courtesy of Bob Finch of Black Star)

Robert Coles in 1971
(photo courtesy of William V. Anderson)

Daniel Berrigan today

Robert Coles today
Introduction to the 2001 edition
by Robert Coles
Each book has its particular life, and each awaits the new readers the passage of time provides. It is hoped that this new edition of The Geography of Faith will enable today s readers to travel back across three decades to experience that time when their nation was going through a significant conflict. By now, for many, the political and social travail of the Vietnam War is a matter of history-though some who fought in that war, or opposed it, or resisted it with all their personal might, are very much still with us, their memories a continuing collective record of that time when a powerful democracy had become a nation culturally and morally divided.
What follows should give readers approaching this book for the first time a fairly vivid sense of the climate of that time over a generation ago, when a devout Catholic priest, a Jesuit poet and teacher, decided to stand up to the American version of the principalities and powers mentioned in the Bible, and consequently was pursued by federal officials and their police agents-hence the word underground in this volume s subtitle. A person of relative privilege a person devoted to religious activity and contemplation, became a hunted fugitive. It was a situation that not only changed one priest s life, but that symbolized a turnaround in his country s social attitudes: a topsyturvy state of affairs it was, when a clergyman could become a fugitive from federal authorities, and it caused countless citizens to stop and think as they never had before about their relationship to their own country s policies, and even about their very allegiance to their nation s executive and legislative leaders.
How well I remember the conversations that came to make up this book, and how clearly I still remember hearing a particular commentary on them from my fellow psychoanalyst and wise mentor Erik H. Erikson, in whose course I was teaching as an assistant at the time. Professor Erikson followed the decision Father Berrigan had made with great and sympathetic interest. And it was to him I turned for support when my wife, Jane, and I decided to stand beside Father Berrigan, stay the course with him, and ask him to stay with us (an action itself in violation of the law, as in the phrase harboring a fugitive from justice ). Professor Erikson was then studying Gandhi s philosophy of nonviolence as it had been lived out by him and his followers in British-controlled India.
One day, as we sat in Professor Erikson s Harvard study recording the conversations, the august and attentive and reflective Erikson asked that I stop the tape recorder so that he could pose some questions to us, and so, I later realized, that he could think carefully about what he d been hearing. I hope you will put all this on the record, he said (though at that point neither Dan Berrigan nor I knew what we intended to do with our conversations). I promised him that I would do so-make of the talks some kind of written record. We then listened to Professor Erikson s discourse on history, no less, and on those who witness it and become involved in its workings, the very stuff of his long-time research interests:
You both are saying a lot for us to hear and consider, but I d like to say here that what you are telling us, the words you send each other s way, are about seeing : each of you is, right now, an eyewitness to a history that is taking place before your eyes, the two of you, of course, but also before the eyes of your fellow American citizens-and maybe others who watch this country so closely for obvious reasons, its world-wide influence. Some people will learn through reading what it meant to belong to a country and worry about its direction-to disagree with its direction. You and Father Berrigan may believe that it s your duty to dissent (in his case), and some would disagree with what you both have said or concluded-with your assumptions and assertions-while others would take a step further, and wish that Father Berrigan had been caught, right away. And so, there d have been no such conversations as these which you re about to make available to the rest of us who read magazines and newspapers and books. A friend of Gandhi s told me this (I thought of what he said while I listened to what the two of you said): We were all trying to figure out what to think, what to do [with respect to the British laws and powers as they were enforced in India], and one day Gandhi spoke up, he said we had to act, and then our words would take on a new shape-they would follow our deeds and be given a life, he said, by what had been done.
There followed a silence, as Professor Erikson seemed far away, his eyes looking beyond the room where we sat, and his head lowered, almost as if he were doing something more than just remembering those words. Finally, he returned to the subject at hand: You are always mentioning fate, chance, drawing on your friend George Eliot [whose novels I like to teach, and consider eminently desirable and worthy companions, and so, yes, friends, in a certain way] and I think now is the time for someone to mention that fate and chance and circumstance have offered Father Berrigan and you a time, a time to be together and to think about history itself, about what can happen to us as we live our lives, and events take place, and, well, catch us up in them. As I m always saying, history and the individual -but that is an abstract statement, and you two are offering a witness to history, I d call it, some comments on life, as it gets engaged, sometimes with the world s changing events, and sometimes with its turmoil, its conflicts.
Then an even longer silence, as we both thought about what Gandhi had said in comparison with our own conversations, Father Berrigan, a Jesuit priest on the move with his government in pursuit of him, pausing to make sense of his hopes and fears, his concerns and purposes, and I, an American citizen, his wife and children in a room only a few feet away, pausing in his own way to wonder what ought to be done by others like him-a nation s people then in considerable doubt, confusion, apprehension, with no small amount of felt misgivings becoming a daily matter of public discourse.
Finally, this from Professor Erikson: You have had your say to each other, and now is the time, the historical moment I keep mentioning, the occasion, to bring others into this conversation you ve both had-so that today, and tomorrow, and in future years, when all this will be over, will be part of the past then, years from now, this will be out there for people to try to understand-a part of our country s twentieth-century history to be studied, a lesson, you could say, to be learned, so that future events will, perhaps, be viewed with events in mind like this recent series of events we ve all been through. We learn from one another, even as I think you and your priest friend have tried to learn about life s obligations and responsibilities-and possibilities, too-from one another; and I think you both may have been speaking with others in mind as well as yourselves, and others who will be born, as well as those now alive. That is what articles in magazines or in books do: the words of the writers become constantly available to readers-to stir or prod them, to give them a second s pause, or even longer sometimes.
Small wonder that I went back to these observations now, when this book is yet again being sent forth-a book that chronicles a trying episode in a trying time for a nation, when an overseas war cast its loud and compelling echo across a divided country, for a while seemingly at war with itself-so that individuals like Father Berrigan gradually, then forthrightly, became stirred to vigorously-expressed and enacted political dissent (throwing their own lives willingly, eagerly, into a social confrontation with the powers that be).
Meanwhile, there were others who took these dissidents into their homes, took sides with them, or yearned to do so, or feared doing so, but yearned not to be under the control of such fears-those who were considering what ought to be done, and when, and why, in the course of one s life as a citizen of a