NEW YORK (ABP) — William Sloane Coffin Jr., former CIA agent, peace activist, Yale University chaplain, accomplished pianist and esteemed pastor of Manhattan's Riverside Church, died April 12.
Coffin died from congestive heart failure at his home in Vermont. He was 81.
Known for his outspoken leadership in civil-rights and peace movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Coffin hosted notable speakers like Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela from his chaplain's pulpit at Yale. He later often used his position at Riverside to speak about poverty, the environment, nuclear arms, homosexuality and homelessness.
One of the city's most prominent churches, Riverside is an interdenominational congregation affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Churches. Coffin served as senior pastor there from 1977 to 1987.
In his own speeches, Coffin's optimism and humor balanced his exhortations for social, spiritual and political change. He once told students at Yale, “Remember, young people, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.”
“To my generation, he was a hero,” Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said in a statement. “He could be righteously angry at injustice or war-mongering but masked it behind a Cheshire cat grin. He could be prophetically stern but riotously funny. He could intone profound theological insights but sweeten them with his working-class New York accent. He never lost an opportunity to witness for peace.”
Born to a prominent Manhattan family, Coffin attended Phillips Academy, Yale University and Union Theological Seminary. He received the best schooling available, living with his family in Paris and Switzerland to receive personal instruction in subjects like music and language.
After joining the army, spending two years in West Germany helping the CIA overthrow Stalin, and attending Yale Divinity School, Coffin served as chaplain of Yale University from 1958 to 1975. As an inspirational and controversial chaplain at Yale, Coffin inspired fellow Yale graduate Garry Trudeau to create a cartoon character based on Coffin: “the Rev. Sloan,” a liberal-minded fellow in the Doonesbury comic strip.
Throughout his tenure at Yale, and despite the fact that his family enjoyed considerable wealth and prestige, Coffin's actions often resonated with working-class people. He was arrested several times at demonstrations against segregation, organizing busloads of Freedom Riders to challenge segregation laws in the South. In 1968, he was indicted by a federal grand jury for helping young men turn in their draft cards. An appeals court overturned the guilty verdict in 1970.
In 1972, Coffin started a nuclear-disarmament program at Riverside, and in 1987, he resigned from Riverside Church to pursue disarmament activism full time, reportedly saying there existed “no issue more important for a man of faith.” Despite the move, he did not consider himself a pacifist and accepted international intervention as necessary in some instances, like the genocide in Bosnia.
Coffin is survived by his third wife, Virginia Randolph; his son, a musician in Boston; his daughter, who lives in California; a brother; a sister; and two stepchildren.
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