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Truth: Reverend Jim Lewis

 

 

Reverend Jim Lewis 

Episcopal Clergyperson, Social Activist

Turning the other cheek is a revolutionary idea, and those of us who espouse it as a truly realistic way to break the cycle of violence are marginalized, depicted as dangerous, traitorous and a threat to the established order --- an order dependent on violence and bloodshed to bring peace.


Biography

Jim has been actively engaged, over the past 40 years, addressing the social issues in local communities he’s served as an Episcopal clergyperson. Serving churches and dioceses in Maryland, West Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Delaware, he has organized parishes and communities in addressing health care for women, child care, AIDS, prison and criminal justice issues, capital punishment, war, gay issues, housing, and racial issues.

Active in anti-death penalty work in West Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina and Delaware Jim was one of the founders of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty in North Carolina.

Of particular note is the work that Jim recently completed on the Delmarva Peninsula (the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia.) It was there that poultry process plant workers, chicken catchers, poultry farmers, environmentalists, unions, and community churches came together to form the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance, an organization addressing the injustices and abuses in the poultry industry. That work was featured in a 1999 Sixty Minutes piece with Mike Wallace. This work in the Delmarva also involved the creation of a Latino community center, a health clinic for the poor, a shelter for battered Latino women, and a program to assist men coming out of prison.

Jim has been active in war and peace issues since coming out of the U.S. Marine Corps where he was an infantry officer. His travels on peace missions have been to Cuba, Central America, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine.

Jim has done civil disobedience around coal mine issues, U.S. involvement in war in Central America and Iraq, and poultry labor issues.

He received the West Virginia Governor’s Martin Luther King, Jr. “Living the Dream” award in 1991 and was honored in Delaware by Pacem in Terris in October, 2001, as “A Peacemaker Among Us.” He holds an honorary doctorate from Virginia Theological Seminary.

Writing regularly for various newspapers, he has also authored, West Virginia Pilgrim (Seabury Press), The Gulf War: The Churches & Peacemaking (North Carolina Council of Churches), and has contributed to Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics, and the New War (Chalice Press). He authored a chapter (“Grasshopper Power”) in the recently published book, Workers’ Rights as Human Rights (Cornell Press) which focuses on workplace safety and the role of community organization in bringing about change in the food production system.

Jim is married to Judith Graham, has a son and three daughters, and nine grandchildren. He and Judy live in Charleston, West Virginia. 

 

Truth: William Sloane Coffin

 

William Sloane Coffin
 
Clergyman, Social Activist
 
(1924-2006)

“The war against Iraq is as disastrous as it is unnecessary; perhaps in terms of its wisdom, purpose and motives, the worst war in American history…. Our military men and women…were not called to defend America but rather to attack Iraq. They were not called to die for, but rather to kill for, their country. What more unpatriotic thing could we have asked of our sons and daughters…?” 

 
Additional Quotes by William Sloane Coffin

  • I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
  •  Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful.""It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.
  •  Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; it confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of change. The painful truth--one with a long history--is that police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful disgestion for the rich.
  •  I'm not always optimistic but i am always hopeful.

Biography
 
For more than forty years, William Sloane Coffin has spoken with prophetic zeal on matters of war and peace, social justice and religious faith.

His early years—birth in New York City, later childhood in Carmel, California, musical studies in Paris, New England preparatory schools—suggest a world of almost limitless opportunity. Wartime enlistment in the army and four years of active duty suggest his readiness to engage with history in the making.

After the war, he earned a degree at Yale, enrolled in theological seminary and then worked for three years in the Central Intelligence Agency. Coffin returned to theology in 1953, earning his Bachelor of Divinity from Yale. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister and became a chaplain, attaining national prominence during his seventeen years as chaplain at Yale. In 1977 he became senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City. Ten years later he resigned in order to lead SANE/FREEZE (later renamed Peace Action). He lives in Vermont where he completed a book of reflections on his faith, Credo (2003).

Coffin’s immersion in the controversial moral issues of his generation began in 1960 with international relief work, and the following year he helped train the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in Puerto Rico. Civil Rights dominated the early 1960’s, and Coffin was one of the “Freedom Riders” who challenged segregation laws by riding interstate buses in the South. He was arrested on several occasions. Like his fellow clergyman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Coffin turned his attention in the mid-60s to the escalating U.S. military involvement in Vietnam which he actively protested. He co-founded the Americans for Re-appraisal of Far Eastern Policy and joined other religious leaders in forming the National Emergency Committee of Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. With Dr. Benjamin Spock and others, he was charged and convicted with conspiracy to aid draft resisters, a verdict overturned on appeal in 1970. Coffin’s memoir, Once to Every Man (1977), details this period of civil rights advocacy and peace activism.

Coffin’s commitment to humanity springs from his religious faith, and the core of his faith is love: “To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”

Truth: Dorothy Day

 

Dorothy Day 

Social Activist, Journalist
 
1897-1980
 

The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.

 

Additional Quotes by Dorothy Day

  • We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.
  • We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.
  • They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
  • Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the
  • We must recognize the fact that many Nazis, Marxists and Fascists believe passionately in their fundamental rightness, and allow nothing to hinder them from their goal in the pursuit of their mission.
    soul.
  • Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm.

 Biography

Dorothy Day combined her political passion for justice and equality with her religious commitment for serving the destitute. She wanted her words to match precisely with her deeds. She took a vow of poverty and lived a life of service to the poor in the hospitality houses ( an extension of the work that Jane Addams did in Hull House) that she helped to establish in cities across the U.S. She worked tirelessly and was arrested often in the struggles for womens rights, birth control, workers rights, and against war. Her quote about playing things very safe and ending up moral failures reflects the attitude of everyone in this series. Think for a moment how different the world would be if Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Rachel Carson had played it safe. What if Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, William Sloane Coffin, and Muhammad Ali had played it safe?


Dorothy Day was born in New York in 1897. Her childhood was spent mostly in Chicago, and she attended the University of Illinois in Urbana for two years before returning to New York with her family in 1916. Her reading of such authors as Tolstoy and Upton Sinclair deepened her concern for the sufferings of the poor. Day's conversion to Catholicism followed the birth of her daughter. She was now committed to a revolution of the heart, a revolution in which the human individual experiences the transforming change of heart and renewal of spirit to which the Gospel calls all persons to care for the hungry and despised.

In Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day met a like-minded believer and reformer. In 1933 the two began the Catholic Worker movement, which not only published an influential newspaper but founded a number of hospitality houses to serve the homeless.

"What we would like to do is change the world, make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world." The author of these words is even now being considered for sainthood in the church she loved, but shortly before her death in 1980 she said: Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.


 

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