Suspect Tenderness: The Ethics of the Berrigan Witness

William Stringfellow · Anthony Towne

Jul 2006 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

Suspect Tenderness opens with a narrative concerning the capture of Daniel Berrigan, related in his continuing friendship and pastoral relationship with Stringfellow and co-author Anthony Towne. It continues with an examination of the ethical and theological implications of the Berrigan witness, in which middle-class American piety is asked to face the fact that Jesus was a criminal. Stringfellow insists that every state feels threatened by Christ's claim to a moral authority over death, and sees the "community of resistance" as a community of resurrection.

About the author

William Stringfellow was a practicing attorney and a prominent Episcopalian, who frequently contributed to legal and theological journals. After his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1956, he practiced some years in the East Harlem neighborhood in New York City, subsequently moving to Block Island, RI. When Daniel Berrigan was apprehended by the FBI at Stringfellow and Towne's home in 1969, the hosts were charged with harboring a fugative. Anthony Towne was a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The New Yorker. Best known for Excerpts from the Diaries of the Late God, he was a book review editor for Motive Magazine, founder of the Block Island Writers Guild, and collaborator with Stringfellow on a number of book projects.