The Monk - The Artist - The Aunt - The Essayist - The Woman - The
Jesuit - The Mother - Self-Portrait Berrigan's Portraits is his first
completely biographical work, and it is perhaps his most intimate book.
Here he speaks candidly of some of the people he has known and admired,
people of fame and people who will probably never be memorialized or
even remembered outside these pages. Here are Thomas Merton, Dorothy
Day, Peter Maurin--guides to the vision that has inspired Berrigan's own
witness to Christian peace. Here is an unknown woman painter, dying of
cancer but gifted with uncanny powers of insight. Here are members of
Berrigan's own family: a tough-minded aunt, who found in the currently
outmoded pieties of the past a remedy for the terrible
day-in-and-day-out of the religious life; his own mother, providential,
foreseeing, compassionate. Lastly there is a self-portrait--not in a
convex mirror, not a picture at an exhibition--of what has been the
meaning of these various people and of their influence on him and his
work. ""For me, Father Daniel Berrigan is Jesus as a poet. If this be
heresy, make the most of it."" -Kurt Vonnegut ""Daniel Berrigan is
America's greatest prophet-poet."" -- James Carroll ""Father Daniel
Berrigan is an altogether winning and warm intelligence and a man who, I
think, has more than anyone I have ever met the true wide-ranging and
simple heart of the Jesuit: zeal, compassion, understanding, and
uninhibited religious freedom. Just seeing him restores one's hope in
the church."" -- Thomas Merton, in ""Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander""
Daniel Berrigan is an internationally known voice for peace and
disarmament. A Jesuit priest, award-winning poet, and the author of over
fifty books, he has spoken for peace, justice, and nuclear disarmament
for nearly fifty years. He spent several years in prison for his part in
the 1968 Catonsville Nine antiwar action and later acted with the
Plowshares Eight. Nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, he
lives and works in New York City.
