THE LIGHT OF SUNDAY.(The Talk of the Town; social activist William Sloane Coffin on his beliefs and latest book)(Interview)

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, now seventy-nine and suffering from terminal heart disease, no longer preaches on Sundays, but he can't stifle the urge to prepare new material for what might as well be called impromptu sermons--at banquets and award ceremonies (increasing numbers of which are held in his honor these days), or whenever someone happens to drop by and express an interest. ("I'd like to think I could view all people as potential converts," he has said.) He keeps a stack of spiral-bound notebooks handy for jotting down interesting quotes and facts that he comes across while reading, for eventual incorporation into what he calls his ministry of "eclectic scholarship." Recent entries include the phrase "trickle-down nuclearism," from Robert Jay Lifton's new book, "Superpower Syndrome"; a description of President Bush as being "too intellectually insecure . . . so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded," from a Times column by David Brooks; and James Carroll's characterization of Jerusalem as the epicenter of "God-sponsored violence."

Politics and religion have never been far apart in the preachings and doings of Bill Coffin. As the chaplain at Yale, in the sixties, he was jailed for his activities as a Freedom Rider in Montgomery, and then tried, as a member of the Boston Five, for conspiracy to resist the Vietnam draft. Later, as the head of Manhattan's Riverside Church, he ministered to the American hostages in Iran, and advocated aids awareness in the epidemic's early years. According to Coffin, the faith's two Biblical mandates are not preserving the sanctity of life and stamping out sin, as Jerry Falwell might have it, but, rather, the pursuit of justice and the search for peace. His new book, "Credo," which is made up of excerpts culled from a lifetime of sermons and speeches, amounts to a spiritual denunciation of modern American government. So it was not surprising, the other day, to hear Coffin sounding off on Iraq.

"Anybody sitting in distant Vermont knew perfectly well that, just as Yugoslavia was threatened with chaos after Tito, in Iraq after Saddam Hussein you'd have Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south, and the Sunnis in the middle," he said. "And now we're going to form a democratic government?" Coffin was sitting at his kitchen table, with flies buzzing around him, in distant Vermont--Strafford, a village of about a thousand. There was snow in the yard. "It's Sunday--I guess I'm getting worked up," he said. "These guys, don't they know anything about history? Poor old Woodrow Wilson said, 'We're ending World War I--we're going to make the world safe for democracy.' As a result, we opened all kinds of doors to every kind of dictator, from Ataturk all the way to Salazar, and in between Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin." Coffin's wife, Randy, stoked the fire in the living room. Their Dalmatian sat quietly nearby, seeming almost to listen. "If you know your New Testament, you know it was the Devil who tempted Jesus with unparalleled power and wealth," he continued. "Well, that's something to think about for a superpower."

Norman Mailer once described Coffin's voice as equal parts union organizer and Ivy League crew coach. He speaks more deliberately now, struggling to pronounce certain words--the result of a stroke suffered in 1999. Once ...