ON SELFISHNESS:

There is no smaller package in the world that that of a person all wrapped up in himself.

ON TOLERANCE:

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.

An abundance of wisdom in an economy of words by a leading activist preacher.

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.

Coffin offers an antidote to politics of the religious right with a call to liberals to reenter the fray with an unabashedly Christian view of social justice, arguing that "compassion demands confrontation" on many controversial topics.

The spiritual and the secular: can they meet? — The politics of compassion — Homophobia: the last "respectable" prejudice — The authority of the Bible — The dangers of self-righteousness — The warhorse — Civility, democracy, and multiculturalism.