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About the Writers

  • CURRENT 2009-2010 SEASON

Daniel Berrigan Lannan Symposium 2009 Member

Daniel Berrigan

Daniel Berrigan is a Jesuit priest, poet and peace activist. From 1970 to 1995 Berrigan spent nearly seven years imprisoned for various offenses related to his protest against war in relation to his moral convictions as a Jesuit. His writing includes Prison Poems and And the Risen Bread: Selected Poems, 1957-1997. He has been awarded by the War Resisters League, Pax Christi, and The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience.

Click here for a sample of Selected and New Poems

 

Links to other texts about Daniel Berrigan

Interview

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! welcomes Berrigan for an interview to discuss his lifelong commitment to political activism and peace.

This transcript and audio file records Goodman and Berrigan exploring "his life as a Jesuit priest, poet, pacifist, educator, social activist, playwright and lifelong resister to what he calls 'American military imperialism.'"

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Article

This 2008 article discusses decades of Berrigan's political involvements and spiritual action.

"Forty years ago this month, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. The group carted the files outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm..."

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Critical Review

This review considers how visual artist Adrianna Amari used Berrigan's poems as a launching point for her own artistic engagement with issues of peace and justice.

"In Prayer for the Morning Headlines: On the Sanctity of Life and Death, photographer Adrianna Amari responds to selected Berrigan poems with her remarkable photographs of statuary in aging Baltimore cemeteries... Berrigan's poems have long been recognized for their spiritual beauty. Kurt Vonnegut once called him 'Jesus as a poet,' and added, 'If this be heresy, make the most of it.' Amari's art may not be as well known, but her striking photographs will surely draw her an appreciative audience. And yet what truly recommends Prayer for the Morning Headlines is Amari's vision. She has made of her cemetery photographs—the human form in weathered and broken stone, the inevitable creep of weed vines, time rolling in great clouds, drifting in snow and leaf and rose petal—a contemplative place in which to utter the Berrigan poems as prayer..."

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