Coffin, William Sloane (1924–2006)

William Sloane Coffin was the chaplain at Yale University from 1958 to 1975 and the senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City from 1977 to 1987, the most visible and activist pulpit in the United [Page 362]States. Coffin is most popularly known as the inspiration for the Reverend Sloan character in Garry Trudeau's immortal comic strip Doonesbury.

Bill Coffin, as he was known to his friends, was born to an affluent family in New York City in 1924. He was the nephew of Henry Sloane Coffin, once president of the activist Presbyterian school, Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. A classmate of George H. W. Bush, Coffin graduated high school from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1942, and went on to spend his young adult years variously as a gifted pianist, army member, and Central Intelligence Agency official. He graduated first from Yale University in 1949 and then later from Yale Divinity School and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1956. A product of social gospel thinking, which combined the insights of Marx and Christianity in its quest for justice for all, Coffin was heavily influenced by the justice manifestos of his Yale seminary teacher, H. Richard Niebuhr, as well as the growing national foment for civil rights and integration.

In the years he spent at Yale University as a chaplain, Coffin was well known and contested as a supporter of student uprisings and as an opponent of segregation and the United States' participation in the Vietnam War. He became a vocal and prominent leader in the Freedom Riders, a group of activists who rode interstate buses in an effort to desegregate the South in the 1960s. In his time at Riverside Church, his interests moved, along with current national events, to nuclear disarmament. One of his high-profile activities during these years was his presidency of SANE/FREEZE (now called Peace Action), the United States' largest disarmament organization. This contribution was radical and bold in a time when ministers often were quiet about injustice on a global scale. Most significantly, Coffin used nonviolent means to achieve peace and stood against a bureaucracy that was pro-war.

Among Coffin's many publications is his unerringly honest autobiography, Once to Every Man, and his signature The Heart Is a Little to the Left, a reference to a speech he once heard from Dom Helder Camara, a Brazilian activist bishop. Coffin's biography, written by Warren Goldstein, titled William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience, was reviewed in every major publication in the United States, including the New York Times, adding support to the author's largely undisputable argument that Coffin was, and is, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., the most influential Protestant religious figure in the United States. He will be remembered for the boycotts, his use of his influential positions to effect social change, and as one of the great religious leaders of the 20th century.

He retired to Vermont with his third wife, Virginia Randolph Witson (Randy). He died in April 2006.

...