Loren McGrail presents award to William Sloane Coffin

We are honored and privileged to honor you, William Sloane Coffin, for your passionate words, your faithful witness, and your vision for reminding us still, that another world is possible.

We honor you today for your courage to speak truth to power, for being one of the first to accept draft cards from young men protesting the Vietnam War, for being a freedom rider, for your leadership in the nuclear disarmament movement and SANE and your voice raging still against the last respectable prejudice, homophobia. You grew up in a family of entitlement and chose to use your gifts and position to serve others through your roles as chaplain and minister.

As a seminary student here at Andover Newton, a Christian called to a ministry of healing violence through the study and practice of nonviolence, your words and actions have inspired me often or drawn me to the uncomfortable edge where compassion has demanded confrontation.

Your recent books, including the recently released Credo, remind us how a person of faith is called by Love to stand up. speak out and act. Some have called you a "visionary companion', a " joyfully embattled Christian', an "American Knight, a "modern American Patriot." At the Peace Abbey, we call you a "peacemaker" for your name is inscribed into our peacemakers table. There, like here, you are surrounded by your friends and mentors, the Berrigans, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, St .Francis, and of course, Jesus too.

It is with enormous gratitude and respect that we, who are gathered here today, your friends, fellow ministers and chaplains, scholars and seminarians, honor you with this Award. And on behalf of all those who are not here, whose lives you have touched, mentored, or changed, I present to you, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award for your life-long commitment to peace and social justice, for demonstrating that individually and collectively we can change the world through a force more powerful than war, racism, militarism, or homophobia, and that force is love.