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William Stringfellow: "An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens In A Strange Land

3 min read

Among the many Christmas gifts I received this year, I was quite pleased to get a book which had been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for several months: William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land. I will confess to having been completely ignorant of Stringfellow prior to someone online (I forget who) recommending this book, but he seems to have been a fascinating fellow; an Anglican layman who graduated Harvard Law only to move to Harlem and doing pro bono legal work for racial minorities and sex offenders.

To quote Ben Myers excellent summary of Stringfellow’s emphasis:

The most striking feature of Stringfellow’s work is his powerful analysis and critique of the “principalities.” For him, the principalities are institutionalised forms of death. Institutions exist for the sake of their own expansion and self-perpetuation; they are not subject to human control, but are autonomous entities vis-à-vis all human agency. Human beings often believe “that they control the institution; whereas, in truth, the principality claims them as slaves” (Free in Obedience, p. 99).

I’m only 35 pages into this slim 150-page volume - having read only the introduction and Chapter 1 - but I’m immediately struck by how timely his critique of American government and corporate institutions is. Consider this:

The Fall is where the nation is… Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for the most part, become consigned to despair. The people have been existing under a state of such interminable warfare that it seems normative. There is little resistance to the official Orwellian designation of war as peace, nor does that rhetorical deception come near exhausting the ways in which the people have found the government to be unworthy of credence or trust. Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance or convenience turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is pervasive babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated. … Americans have been learning, harshly, redundantly, that they inherit or otherwise possess no virtue or no vanity which dispels the condition of death manifest everywhere in the nation. (p. 19-20)

If Stringfellow felt this strongly in 1973, what would he be thinking today in 2012?

An Ethic is not quick reading but to this point every page has been worthwhile.

Originally published on by Chris Hubbs