Remembering Rev. William Sloane Coffin

I was saddened to learn that Rev. William Sloane Coffin died today. I know that he had been gravely ill for a number of years, and his death is not unexpected. But I'm still sad that I never had a chance to meet him. Here's part of an interview he did with PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly:

Justice is at the heart of religious faith. It's not something that is tacked on. And justice is not charity. Charity tries to alleviate the effects of injustice. Justice tries to eliminate the causes of injustice. Charity is a personal disposition. Justice is public policy. What this country needs, what I think God wants us to do, is not practice piecemeal charity but engage in wholesale justice. And that's not only to erase or greatly reduce the wage gap and the living standards in America, but really to be committed to doing something about the horrible, really horrible poverty of at least one third of the people on the planet. If you want to do something good for national security, and every American should, take billions of dollars and wage war against world poverty. That would have a very sobering effect on terrorism. Terrorism now has a wonderful recruitment policy supplied by the United States foreign policy. If we were serious, with other nations, to engage the war on poverty around the world, that would stem the flow of recruits to the ranks of terrorists.

Some of you may remember that Coffin endorsed Howard Dean for president:

He said his favorite Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination is another Vermonter, the state's former governor, Howard Dean.

"But any Democrat, except Joe Lieberman, would be a vast improvement over George Bush," Coffin added.

On a related note, this is from an article in The New Yorker:

As a self-described "yellow-dog Democrat," Coffin offered his opinions on the Presidential campaign. Wesley Clark, he said, "might be a highly intelligent General Haig, or he might be a good leader of the party. I don't know." John Kerry, meanwhile, "has a face that looks as though it could be moved right up on Mt. Rushmore without going through the White House." He smiled mischievously. "Joe Lieberman heard that I'm not supposed to last very long, so he called me. In his pious tone, Joe started to say how much I had meant to him. I cut him off. 'Joe, I would give my right arm to have the influence on you now that I had then. You're an orthodox Jew and a conservative Democrat. It'd be better if you were the other way around-a conservative Jew and an orthodox Democrat!" Coffin is a Howard Dean man.

More:
Wikipedia article
Crossposts (with more background and additional links) at My Left Wing, Booman Tribune, Street Prophets, and Daily Kos
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