If the name William Stringfellow rings a bell for readers who are otherwise unaware of his writings or life of advocacy, it is likely because it was at his cabin on Block Island, R.I., that Daniel Berrigan, S.J., was finally captured by the F.B.I. in 1970. Father Berrigan had led the F.B.I. on what he called “the merry chase” for four months after he and his brother Phil had gone underground after their conviction for destroying draft records in 1968 as part of the “Catonsville Nine.”
Eventually tracking him down at the cabin that Stringfellow and his partner, the poet Anthony Towne, shared (they named it “Eschaton,” because, according to Stringfellow, “eschaton means the end of the world coinciding with the beginning of the world as the Kingdom of God”), F.B.I. agents posed as birdwatchers and finally nabbed the fugitive priest; the picture of him in handcuffs, smiling at his arrest, has become iconic. (Stringfellow and Towne were charged with harboring a fugitive, but the charges were dropped a few months later.)
But William Stringfellow’s influence on American Christianity was far larger than that memorable moment. Throughout his life, he was also the modern incarnation of an Old Testament prophet, calling out lies and hypocrisy and demanding fidelity to the commandments of God. His prophetic stances often put him at odds with mainstream American culture and even many of his fellow Christians, but Stringfellow likely didn’t mind that one bit.
This is a fellow who once described the United States as “a fallen nation” and a “conglomeration of principalities and powers in which death furnishes the meaning, in which death is the reigning idol” for its failure to live up to Christian ideals and its obsession with other modern idols like money, power, white supremacy, individual autonomy and more. It was not his task, he once wrote, “to interpret the Bible for the convenience of America.”
Stringfellow’s life and work resisted easy labels. He was an American Christian, a lawyer, a theologian and an activist, but he fit uneasily in all those camps. He wasn’t exactly an evangelical, and despite his insistence on the primacy of the Bible, he was also no fundamentalist. Some of his ideals were simpatico with liberation theology, but he was no fan of any marriage of ideology and Scripture.
He was certainly outspoken, and did not mince his words when critiquing fellow Christians. He once described the leading liberal Protestant schools of theology as teaching little more than “social analysis, gimmicks, solicitations, sentimentalities, and corn.” Ouch. At the same time, he had no patience for his co-religionists who valorized any kind of flight from the world or who refused to apply Scripture to the culture in which they lived. In 1967, he wrote:
If they honored the Bible more highly, they would appreciate that the Word of God will endure demythologizing, that the Word cannot be threatened by anything whatever given humanity to discover and know through any science or discipline of the world…. More than that, if the fundamentalists actually took the Bible seriously, they would inevitably love the world more readily, instead of fearing the world, because the Word of God is free and active in this world and Christians can only comprehend the Word out of their involvement in this world, as the Bible so redundantly testifies.
Born in Rhode Island in 1928, Stringfellow grew up in Northampton, Mass., and attended Bates College in Maine. Raised Episcopalian, he later described himself as “religiously precocious” as a teenager. “I read much about religion, and pursued long and sometimes esoteric conversations with the clergy,” he wrote, though he decided he did not have a vocation to the priesthood. After attending the London School of Economics on a Rotary scholarship, he served in the U.S. Army in Germany for two years.
After receiving his law degree from Harvard in 1956, Stringfellow moved to New York City and began working with poor African-Americans and Latinos, concentrating on questions of constitutional law and violations of due process. “Stringfellow wrote from the echoes of Harlem, the North’s subtler but no less cruel counterpart to the Jim Crow South,” wrote Nathan Schneider in a 2015 essay for America that quoted a line from Stringfellow’s writings, “No White Man Is Innocent”:
Harlem taught him a theology of the demonic principalities—institutions, ideologies, idolatries—that lure us into the dominion of death. Racism, as a principality, is not an aberration of a few cross-burning racists but a condition that manifests itself most pervasively among those who pretend to be innocent of it. Again, ‘No white man is innocent.’
His first book, The Life of Worship and the Legal Profession, appeared in 1955. It would be followed by 15 more, including An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, The Death and Life of Bishop Pike, My People Is The Enemy, Dissenter in a Great Society and The Politics of Spirituality.
Along the way, he influenced many prominent Christian activists and theologians ranging from Karl Barth (“Listen to this man!” Barth once commanded an audience at the University of Chicago) to John Dear to Sharon Delgado to Shane Claiborne and many more. Bates College now recognizes a student every year with the William Stringfellow Award for “courageous and sustained commitment to redressing the systemic, root causes of violence and social injustice.”
Stringfellow died in 1985 at the age of 56 after struggling with diabetes and a long-term digestive ailment, five years after Towne.
“He kept the Word of God so close,” Father Berrigan said of Stringfellow after his death, “and in such wise that its keeping became his own word and its keeping.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Clarification,” by Rachel E. Hicks. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
