A short life of the author
William Stringfellow (26 April 1928 – 2 March 1985) was an American lawyer, lay theologian, and social critic whose radical interpretation of biblical theology as a critique of institutional power made him one of the most original and provocative voices in twentieth-century American Christianity. He was admired by Karl Barth (who reportedly said after visiting the United States that Stringfellow was the person he most wanted Americans to listen to), sheltered the fugitive Daniel Berrigan from the FBI, and produced a body of theological writing that reads less like academic theology than like prophetic dispatch from enemy territory.
Life
Stringfellow was born in Johnston, Rhode Island, and educated at Bates College in Maine and Harvard Law School. After graduating from Harvard in 1956, he chose — against the advice of virtually everyone he knew — to practice law in East Harlem, then one of the poorest and most violent neighbourhoods in New York City. He lived and worked among Puerto Rican and Black residents, providing legal aid and witnessing firsthand the operation of systemic racism, police brutality, and institutional neglect.
The Harlem experience was foundational. It convinced Stringfellow that the principalities and powers described in the Pauline epistles and the Book of Revelation were not merely spiritual abstractions but concrete institutional realities — corporations, governments, ideologies, bureaucracies — that exercised dominion over human beings and opposed the Word of God.
In the late 1960s, Stringfellow moved to Block Island, Rhode Island, with his partner Anthony Towne, a poet. There he continued writing and hosted Daniel Berrigan when Berrigan went underground to evade arrest for destroying draft files at Catonsville, Maryland. Stringfellow was indicted for harbouring a fugitive; the charges were eventually dropped. He suffered from chronic illness for most of his adult life and died at fifty-six.
My People Is the Enemy (1964)
Stringfellow’s first major book is an account of his years in East Harlem — not a memoir in the conventional sense but a theological reflection on poverty, race, and the failure of white Christianity to address either. The book is blunt, angry, and specific: Stringfellow describes slumlords, courtroom injustices, and the indifference of suburban churches with a prosecutor’s precision.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
Stringfellow’s most important work — and one of the essential books of American radical theology — is an extended reading of the Book of Revelation as a guide to living under the domination of the principalities and powers. Stringfellow argues that Revelation is not a prediction of the end times but a description of the present condition: human beings live in Babylon (any and every empire), and the Christian vocation is to live as aliens within Babylon — recognising its claims as fraudulent, resisting its demands for allegiance, and bearing witness to an alternative reality.
The book’s analysis of institutional power — how corporations, nations, and ideologies demand worship, consume human life, and resist reform — anticipates much of what would later be called structural analysis in liberation theology and critical theory.
Other Works
Instead of Death (1963) is a meditation on baptism and the meaning of Christian life. Private and Public Faith (1962) criticises the privatisation of religion in American culture. The Bishop Pike Affair (1967, with Anthony Towne) defends Bishop James Pike against heresy charges. Conscience and Obedience (1977) continues the political theology of An Ethic.
Critical Standing
Stringfellow has been rediscovered in the twenty-first century by a new generation of Christian activists and theologians drawn to his uncompromising critique of American empire and his insistence that theology must engage with political and economic structures. His work anticipates the concerns of liberation theology, the New Monasticism, and the Christian left. He remains a marginal figure in academic theology but an influential one in activist Christianity.
Collecting Stringfellow
Stringfellow’s books were published by small religious presses and are modestly priced: $10–$40 for first editions. An Ethic for Christians (1973, Word Books) is the most sought after. Copies inscribed to Daniel Berrigan or other figures in the Catholic peace movement would be significant.