Daniel Berrigan

Thích Nhất Hạnh

A new dialogue between the radical Jesuit priest and the Vietnamese Zen master covers a wide range of topics relevant to the Buddhist-Christian relationship, including war, peace, death, Jesus, and the Buddha. Original.

Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness

The Raft is Not the Shore

On May 17, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, nine men and women entered a Selective Service office outside Baltimore. They removed military draft records, took them outside, and set them afire with napalm. The Catholic activists involved in this protest against the war included Daniel and Philip Berrigan; all were found guilty of destroying government property and sentenced to three years in jail. Dan Berrigan fled but later turned himself in. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine became a powerful expression of the conflicts between conscience and conduct, power and justice, law and morality. Drawing on court transcripts, Berrigan wrote a dramatic account of the trial and the issues it so vividly embodied. The result is a landmark work of art that has been performed frequently over the past thirty-five years, both as a piece of theater and a motion picture.

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

Daniel Berrigan's fiery appreciation of the prophet Jeremiah is "spiritual reading" of the searing sort, for persons and groups to feel anew the biblical flame of social justice, religious courage, and personal witness. Perhaps no Hebrew prophet speaks so directly to our time as Jeremiah. Perhaps no contemporary can unveil his message and warning as can Daniel Berrigan, whose eloquence and courage, like Jeremiah's, expose the corruption of religious commitment, address national trauma and uncertainty, and proclaim the requirements of true lament and resolve.

The World, the Wound of God

Jeremiah

Poetry, Drama, Prose

I have a sense that the times themselves, apart from more or less deliberately created crises, render strong things fragile, and fragile things mortally endangered. The times themselves are a permanent crisis. So writes Daniel Berrigan in this journal of reflections and musings from the late 1970s. First published in 1981, this book traces Berrigan's work after his release from Danbury Prison in 1972 for his part in the Catonsville Nine antiwar demonstration--from his experiences in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and France (where he lived with Thich Nhat Hanh), to his experiences as a teacher in Manitoba and Berkeley. Throughout, Berrigan ponders the commands of Christ, the struggle to be faithful to these commands, and why so few take them seriously. With wit and wisdom, Berrigan shares his faith journey and encourages us to stay faithful to that journey, to be peacemakers for the long haul.

Ten Commandments for the Long Haul

Berrigan draws clear parallels between Deuteronomy's time of mingled triumph and broken law and the present moment in history, uncovering the stories within the story of this complex biblical book.

No Gods But One

Parables, Prayers, and Meditations

Love, Love at the End

Portrayal of the lives and experiences of terminally ill patients on the hospice ward of St. Rose's Home, as they tell of their inner strength, religious conviction, and personal courage

Talking with the Very Ill

We Die Before We Live

“The trouble with our state,” Daniel Berrigan writes in his great poem, “was not civil disobedience, which in any case was hesitant and rare. . . . The trouble with our state—our state of soul, our state of siege, was civil obedience.” This poem, like the many others gathered here together by Daniel Berrigan’s friend and editor, Rev. John Dear, continues his famous critique of the American war machine and summons readers to carry on his campaign of nonviolence for the abolition of war, violence, and nuclear weapons. “In this collection, I’ve brought together some of his most well-known political poems, poems from prison, poems from resistance, and a few never before published," John Dear writes in his foreword. "I hope they will inspire us to take up where Daniel Berrigan left off—following the nonviolent Jesus by resisting the culture of war, racism, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction and pursuing a new culture of justice, disarmament and environmental sustainability.” May we heed his call and carry on the gospel journey of civil disobedience, creative nonviolence, and divine obedience to “seed hope,” “flower peace,” and trace “a liberated zone of paradise.” “In looking over the selections, I’m thinking of poetry and nonviolence,” Bill Wylie-Kellermann writes in his introduction. “There is certainly the matter of bringing more poetics to action, for which Berrigan enjoys virtually a charism. This is not just in the recounting, plucking an action from the street and telling it in verse (there are any number of such here), but for casting actions in symbol, metaphor, liturgy, even sacrament. Enact the poem; embody it.” He continues, “Poetry also has a freedom about it, akin to what Gandhi called non-attachment to results. Like prayer, or sacrament for that matter, one offers a poem into the world, setting it loose and letting it go. It is. A germinating seed. In that sense, this book is a seed packet of nonviolent resistance. The sower has cast it. Upon Earth. Upon us all.”

The Trouble with Our State

This new edition of Daniel Berrigan's classic autobiography To Dwell in Peace, with a new afterword by the author, takes us through his childhood in Syracuse; his early years as a Jesuit, teacher, priest, and poet; his bold 1968 Catonsville Nine action, when he poured homemade napalm on draft files in opposition to the U.S. war on Vietnam; and his ongoing civil disobedience, which led to his going underground and subsequent two-year imprisonment. We read of friends like Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, and his brother Philip Berrigan, with whom he participated again in the 1980 Plowshares Eight disarmament action. Daniel Berrigan's breathtaking story and the poetic way he tells it inspire and challenge us to resist war, pursue nuclear disarmament, and undertake a similar journey to peace, hope, and justice.

An Autobiography

To Dwell in Peace

Edward W. Said

Israël Shahak

Association of Arab-American University Graduates

Possibility of Concord

Arabs and Jews

Themes of 42 biblical Psalms are reweaved into contemporary poetry & prayer.

A Book of Psalms

Uncommon Prayer

Berrigan offers a brilliant, poetic commentary on the Acts of the Apostles with the daring proposition that this New Testament book is left unfinished, and that we are called to take up the story, enter the book, and engage in our own bold, daring acts as apostles of the peacemaking Jesus. Writing from his own experience of civil disobedience and prophetic action, he challenges us to join the early community of Christian peacemakers by living as they did, acting as they did, and speaking out for peace and justice as they did. Whereon to Stand not only brings the New Testament alive, but offers new life and hope for us that our lives, our actions, our stand may help disarm the world and carry on the work of the peacemaking Jesus.

The Acts of the Apostles and Ourselves

Whereon to Stand

This extraordinary book, written during the four months that Daniel Berrigan was resisting arrest and living underground, is an unexpected gift. Rather than being merely an account of a fugitive's life, this is a spiritual work of the highest order, the work of an unusual man brooding over injustice, war, and love and setting forth his vision of what a man can become. His starting point is St. John of the Cross, from whom the author draws the inspiration that informs his unorthodox commentary on The Dark Night of the Soul. Here, John is the guru, the master to whom the disciple comes for enlightenment, the one whose vision inspires the disciple as he searches for his own vision. As the commentary moves on, it becomes the instrument by which Father Berrigan extends his own moral commitment to explore and reaffirm his spiritual philosophy, his concern for the world, his intense desire to awaken and move society in a nonviolent way. The result is a magnificent outpouring of prose and poetry--intense, personal, witty; the exposition of the heart of a man.

The Dark Night of Resistance

Selected Poems of Daniel Berrigan

Tulips in the Prison Yard

The scenario that confronts us in the biblical text of 1 and 2 Kings is a turbulent one. Daniel Berrigan minces no words in his assessment of that biblical era. Prophets, kings, and the gods they worship - all are found wanting. Berrigan examines the complex terrain of these two biblical books, opening our eyes to the deep flaws of their oft-praised characters. He shows that this dark time in biblical history is in many ways repeating itself today. The wars of these kings, Berrigan says, are our wars now, and we are fashioning our own gods to approve our misdeeds. These two books of Scripture come to vivid - and sometimes terrifying - life when we recognize these undeniable similarities. The Kings and Their Gods reveals Berrigan in stunning form. Here this modern-day prophet distills the wisdom gained from his long learning and his remarkable life experiences. The book is both a masterful biblical commentary and a clarion call to action. It balances polemics and poetry, despair and joy. It is truly a midrash for our troubled times - both an indictment of the horror that is and an invitation to the great goodness that may be.

The Pathology of Power

The Kings and Their Gods

The Monk - The Artist - The Aunt - The Essayist - The Woman - The Jesuit - The Mother - Self-Portrait Berrigan's Portraits is his first completely biographical work, and it is perhaps his most intimate book. Here he speaks candidly of some of the people he has known and admired, people of fame and people who will probably never be memorialized or even remembered outside these pages. Here are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin--guides to the vision that has inspired Berrigan's own witness to Christian peace. Here is an unknown woman painter, dying of cancer but gifted with uncanny powers of insight. Here are members of Berrigan's own family: a tough-minded aunt, who found in the currently outmoded pieties of the past a remedy for the terrible day-in-and-day-out of the religious life; his own mother, providential, foreseeing, compassionate. Lastly there is a self-portrait--not in a convex mirror, not a picture at an exhibition--of what has been the meaning of these various people and of their influence on him and his work.

Portraits of Those I Love

"I have a sense that the times themselves, apart from more or less deliberately created crises, render strong things fragile, and fragile things mortally endangered. The times themselves are a permanent crisis." So writes Daniel Berrigan in this journal of reflections and musings from the late 1970s. First published in 1981, this book traces Berrigan's work after his release from Danbury Prison in 1972 for his part in the Catonsville Nine antiwar demonstration--from his experiences in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and France (where he lived with Thich Nhat Hanh), to his experiences as a teacher in Manitoba and Berkeley. Throughout, Berrigan ponders the commands of Christ, the struggle to be faithful to these commands, and why so few take them seriously. With wit and wisdom, Berrigan shares his faith journey and encourages us to stay faithful to that journey, to be peacemakers for the long haul.

With prophetic power and conviction, Daniel Berrigan shows how the message of Isaiah can speak directly to us who live at the end of a turbulent period of human history. His book is an exercise in pastoral prophecy for all who seek to apply biblical teaching to contemporary life.

Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears

Isaiah

The prophets exhort us to defend the poor; but we lionize the rich. They assure us that chariots and missiles cannot save us; yet we seek refuge under their cold shadow. They urge us to forgo idolatry; but we compulsively fetishize the work of our hands. Above all, the prophetic Word warns us that the way to liberation in a world locked down by the spiral of violence, the way to redemption in a world of enslaving addictions, the way to genuine transformation in a world of deadened conscience and numbing conformity, is the way of nonviolent, sacrificial, creative love. But neither polite religion nor society is remotely interested in this--which is why Jesus had to "translate" and "midwife" the prophetic insights for his companions in their historical moment. Dan has done the same for us in ours. As this reading of Exodus attests, he has a keen eye for both text and context, and exegetes both with his life. Thus does he help us shed our denial, connect the dots, and move from our pews to the streets. --from the foreword by Ched Myers

Daniel Berrigan

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