Minor Prophets, Major Themes

Daniel Berrigan was born in Virginia, Minnesota on May 9, 1921. He received a bachelor's degree in 1946 from St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit seminary in Hyde Park, New York, and a master's degree from Woodstock College in Baltimore in 1952. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest that year. He spent a year of study and ministerial work in France, then taught theology and French at the Jesuits' Brooklyn Preparatory School. He taught or ran programs at Union Seminary, Loyola University New Orleans, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Yale University before settling into a long tenure at Fordham University.

In the 1960s, he held defiant protests that helped shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam War. These protest included burning of Selective Service draft records in Catonsville, Maryland for which he was convicted of destroying government property and sentenced to three years in the federal prison. He served from 1970 to 1972. He was arrested several more times for taking part in the Plowshares raid on a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania in 1980 and for blocking the entrance to the Intrepid naval museum in Manhattan in 2006.

He wrote more than 50 books during his lifetime including 15 volumes of poetry. His works included To Dwell in Peace and Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings. Time Without Number won the Lamont Poetry Prize (now known as the James Laughlin Award), in 1957. He died on April 30, 2016 at the age of 94.

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