Daniel Berrigan

An activist chaplain, William Sloan Coffin, spoke about the Cold War and the risk of nuclear conflagration.

But the speaker who made the deepest impression on me was Daniel Berrigan.

He's a Jesuit priest who's well known for his act of civil disobedience during the Vietnam War.

Berrigan had gone to jail for pouring napalm on the military draft files.

So contrast is the first tool.

The next one is cause and effect, that if you have two opposite things pushing against each other, if you want to engage people over time, you create the feeling that one shot causes the next, that one event causes the next, and it becomes an engine driving the story forward through time.

An example from my life was that when I went, because I saw Daniel Berrigan speak when I was a student, I became interested to write a play like A Thousand Crane.

that cause had an effect.

A production of St. Stephen's University, the Jim Forest Institute.

'Cause as Dan Berrigan says, "If you wanna follow Jesus-

"You better look good on wood."

[singing]

which in January of 68, the year after Vietnam logical withdrawal, and not only does the Tet Offensive push a great deal of the U.S. population against the war by showing that the North Vietnamese and their allies in the South were not to be trifled with and were ready to advance and fight, And even though the U.S. repelled their attacks on bases, it was a brutal psychological blow to the idea that the U.S. was about to win this war.

While all this bombing is happening in chaos, Howard Zinn and Father Daniel Berrigan are flying to Hanoi to get POWs out of jail.

So as the bombs are dropping, Here's Zinn and Berrigan attempting to rescue these POWs.

And I don't want to say too much about that story because it's just too good a story, but that's in the book as well.

We...

You had just gotten arrested at Riverside Research with, with Daniel Berrigan, our great friend and mentor.

Mm-hmm.

We're both, like, groupies of Dan.

It was the summer war of 1982, and I was so on fire with the Beatitudes, I s- I said, "I'll spend the rest of my life teaching this Jesus' way of peace and non-violence and the Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount." Two weeks later, I entered the Jesuits.

What do you do? And I'm still trying to do that.

I wrote a letter to Daniel Berrigan, and he kinda never recovered.

[laughs]

He's able to pitch in with a different perspective on reality, on the world.

And so people in his own time, civil rights leaders, nonviolent Christian activists like Dorothy Day or Jim Forrest or Daniel Berrigan, these people were able to see Merton and say, this guy gets it.

And one might ask, how does a guy who lives in the woods in a cinder block hermitage out there in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky, how is he so spot on and so prophetic when it comes to things that are happening in Vietnam today? and in the streets of Memphis and in, you know, New York City or what have you.

And it's, I think, because he was looking at it through the lens of faith, deeply grounded as a man of prayer, who was open and not threatened and free to see the world as it actually is.

And even though the U.S. repelled their attacks on bases, it was a brutal psychological blow to the idea that the U.S. was about to win this war.

While all this bombing is happening in chaos, Howard Zinn and Father Daniel Berrigan are flying to Hanoi to get POWs out of jail.

So as the bombs are dropping, Here's Zinn and Berrigan attempting to rescue these POWs.

And I don't want to say too much about that story because it's just too good a story, but that's in the book as well.

Really? Did that? Did I say that?

Oh, I talk about Dan Berrigan.

Oh.

who was the, I talk about several people, Lucy Kurian.

That's also in the book.

my relationship with that family that came through Father Bill.

And so I talk about Dan Berrigan and about a friend of mine who was a young Catholic woman who met Dorothy Day and got swept up in the Catholic workers movement, which was very much about and still is about connecting with people who are unhoused and helping them get their feet under them and treating them with dignity, which was a huge teaching from the Christian tradition of treating each person with the dignity of the divine.

So I have other exemplars in there.