A Simplicity of Faith Quotes

“There are those in high office who talk pompously of ‘limited nuclear strikes’ and ‘acceptable risks’ of tens of millions of casualties, but I suggest that anyone capable of such bizarre calculations is patently insane – in the old legal meaning of insanity as loss of conscience, or moral disability.”
― William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning

“Over and over again, while I was in the law school, I was astonished at how eagerly many of my peers surrendered to this regimen of professionalistic conditioning, often squelching their own most intelligent opinions or creative impulses in order to conform or to appear to be conforming.”
― William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning

“Despite the notoriety that has been attached to the witness of civil disobedience, notably in the era of Martin Luther King Jr., and then in the antiwar movement of the Sixties, there has been little threat to the rule of law in these protests. In fact, the major burden of them has been to act to redeem the constitutional system. The substantive danger to this society, so far as law is concerned, comes from the operation of lawless authority and the substitution of the power of coercion for the rule of law.”
― William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning

“If either public or personal responses to the Berrigan witness are not to be some form of cop-out, the rubric for comprehending what they are saying and doing is supplied, manifestly, by the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is the chronicle of the many arrests, trials, imprisonments, exiles, tortures, and executions suffered by the pioneer Christians at the behest of the ruling authorities. In those confrontations, the issue is not whether the apostles in their witness are ‘effective,’ or otherwise have prospects of what the world knows as ‘success’ or ‘victory.’ The issue, instead, is whether the apostles speak and act faithfully in the gospel, and thus exemplify in their living the truth and power of the Word of God transcending and disrupting the reign of death, and the idolatry of the power of death, in any and all regimes of this world.”
― William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning

“Whatever happened I would not, I dared not, become a hostage to grief.

Anthony had been my sweet companion for seventeen years, but grieving for myself because he had died was neither tribute nor benefit to him and should not become the purpose or the focus of my existence.

…If I allowed this, the power of death would not only have claimed Anthony in the grave but would also seize me – prematurely, or without sufficient pretext.”
― William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning

“What is involved in such issues, in the end, is learning to respect the freedom of the dead to be dead; honoring the dead in their status as dead people, and refraining from harassment of the dead by refusing to mythologize the dead or enshrine them. What is at stake is recognition by those in grief of the right of the dead to be regarded mortally, which is to say, to be treated humanly in death.”
― William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning