The Heart Is a Little to the Left

"For his ruggedly handsome, engagingly flawed, humane if not always lawful behavior, he inspired the Doonesbury comic strip character, the Rev. Scot Sloan. In the late 1960s, after the most heated battles of the desegregation movement had passed, U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated and Coffin took on the war as his issue. While his colleagues at Yale had supported him through the civil rights era, his popularity there waned during the Vietnam conflict."

The Los Angeles Times explores the life of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who died yesterday at age 81.

Slate runs an appreciation by Mark Oppenheimer.