"Statue of Justicia (Justice), by Walter Seymour Allward, outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons William Stringfellow – the incisive, trenchant, and often quirky lawyer, activist, and Episcopal theologian – died 40 years ago this weekend (on March 2, 1985) in a Rhode Island hospital. Though death claimed him at age 56, after two decades suffering from chronic disease, it never defeated him. By the accounts of people close to him, he lived in the radical freedom of his calling in the Word of God. Indeed, one might profitably read his 15 books (including three co-written with his lover and partner, the poet Anthony Towne) as one sustained broadside against the rule of Death (the capitalization seems apropos to me) – that mysterious, penultimate, all-pervasive moral power reigning in a fallen cosmos, in society, in politics, and in our very bodies. The academic theology and ethics guilds have been slo...
