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 ix Foreword T he thirty-one short essays by Robert Coles gathered together here appeared as columns in the Catholic weekly America. The firstwas published inNovember1996under the banner“Secular Days,SacredMoments”—atitleColesattributestohisfriendandmentor, Dorothy Day. In that inaugural column Coles recalls a conversation he had with Day forty years earlier when he admitted his uneasy feelings and fears as a medical student working part-time at Day’s Catholic Worker soup kitchen in New York City. It was one thing, he pointed out to her, to encounter those in need in a medical clinic or a hospital under the established (and safe) rules of medical authority—quite another thing to serve the poor in a soup line and face “their unpredictability, their enormous vulnerability, their not rare outbursts.” Day could empathize with Coles’s predicament. “A hospital offers the best of the secular world,” she reminded him. “Here [at the soup kitchen] we are trying hard to do the work of faith.” This defining episode scribes for Coles, in effect, a narrative arc that he hopes to follow in his upcoming “Secular Days, Sacred Moments” columns. Our vulnerability and humility, our willingness to summon candid self-criticism, our courage to let down the shields of position and x  authority . . . these acts of contrition, Coles implies, serve as gateways to “encounters with the sacred.” Subsequent installments at that narrative and existential threshold came regularly in America, roughly once a month, until February 2000. While not “religious” in the conventional sense, Robert Coles has alwaysbeendrawntothesocialwitnessofreligiouslives.Itisanattraction hetracestohisparents.Theyoftendiscussedreligiousandspiritualmatters with Coles and his brother at the dinner table or during long walks when the boys were growing up in Boston. Later, during medical school at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Coles would often slip off to Catholic churches where he could be left alone, “left to pray or sit and day-dream.” He read the Bible and joined other medical students in a New Testament study group, often taking on the role of devil’s advocate. While still in medical school in the early 1950s, Coles fell under the bracing influence of contemporary theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, whose courses he audited at Union Theological Seminary and, later, the University of Chicago during a psychiatry residency. Coles was especially interested in their mixture of religious insight and political sensibility, and the way their systematic theologies made plenty of room for hopefulness and skepticism—later hallmarks, it turns out, of Coles’s monthly America columns. Throughout his career, he drew much inspiration, as well, from modern religious figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, all of whom Coles wroteaboutextensively.Histeaching—inparticular,“LiteratureofSocial Reflection,”thefamousHarvardCollegecourseColesofferedforsomany years—tapped deeply into the religious wellsprings of novelists Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Georges Bernanos, and others. Probably no writer or public intellectual of our era has been as sensitive to the role of  xi faith in the lives of ordinary Americans, especially the poor and the distressed Coles came to know during his extensive documentary fieldwork, those for whom religious faith, he once remarked in an interview, “is a meansofvoicingallkindsofrevolutionarypassions.”Coles’s TheSpiritual Life of Children (1990) earned him further credibility in the national conversation over faith, spirituality, and public life; the book even broke ontotheNewYorkTimesBestSellerList,adistinctionthatnoneofColes’s earlier Children of Crisis books achieved. While cultivating a lifelong suspicion of ideologies and easy fixes to the dilemmas and the challenges of the modern condition, Robert Coles nonetheless readily admits that the “back-and-forthness between faith and doubt is the story of my life.” So Coles was particularly well positioned in 1996 to continue telling that story in the pages of America at the intersection of “Secular Days, Sacred Moments.” Coles understood that crossroads as a meeting ground fortheCatholiccommitmenttofaith,thechurch’srespectforreason,and the value Coles himself placed on personal responsibility and self-insight honed by years of psychiatric practice. It is a place where he could struggle withmoralquestionsastheysurfaceintheconcreteparticularsofeveryday life: such as, “what the devil does this life mean,” as he put it in the introduction to Harvard Diary I (1989), “and how the devil ought we try to live it?” Coles used the America columns to engage such questions along a range of subjects constantly refreshed by the sacred/secular dynamic and his personal tug-of-war between faith and doubt, including writers andpainters(ThomasMerton,TillieOlsen,WinslowHomer),hisrecent reading and film viewing (Othello, The Thin Red Line), contemporary eventsandlingeringcontroversies(busing,homosexuality,thebrutalityof theThirdReich),recollectionsofpastandpresentmentors(ErikErikson; William Carlos Williams; Coles...

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