Reply #4: The real thing. RIP. [View All]

[pinto]

“I don’t come thundering out of the pulpit with the quote unquote truth,” he told People in 1996. “I am involved in a search, and all of my conclusions are tentative.”

He set up a shelter for homeless women in Harlem, started a scouting program for boys and girls at a welfare hotel and organized free lunches and dinners for the homeless. In 1985, early in the AIDS epidemic, he organized a task force to place placards on buses and subways reading “AIDS is a human disease and deserves a humane response.”

He also wrote nearly two dozen books, many of which applied his theology to everyday life. They included “God and Other Famous Liberals” (1991), “Life Lines: Holding On (and Letting Go)” (1996) and “Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday” (2000).

“Much more than a parish minister, he was a writer, thinker and public intellectual of consequence,” Dan Cryer, who is at work on a biography of Mr. Church, wrote in an e-mail message on Friday. “In the ’80s and ’90s, he was a key national spokesman challenging what he depicted as the religious right’s hijacking of flag, family and Bible. He was an eloquent public speaker and commentator on radio and television who also wrote books of enormous spiritual power and who, as a historian, showed great insight into the nuances of church-state relations in American history."