William Stringfellow

Since the 2000–2001 academic year, Bates College annually recognizes a student and a citizen in Maine for their work pursuing peace and justice. The Office of the Chaplain at Bates Colleges gives these awards to individuals who they find have "courageous and sustained commitment to redressing the systemic, root causes of violence and social injustice."

He had a longtime relationship with the Methodist poet Anthony Towne from the 1960s until Anthony died in 1980. He wrote A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning (1982) afterwards, wherein he identified Anthony as "my sweet companion for seventeen years." He never publicly identified himself as a homosexual, but wrote and spoke on the topic, always denouncing the idolatry of both homophobia (as it is now called) in churches and the "ostentation" of gay culture, which he believed too often encouraged assuaging loneliness with lust and promiscuity. He died from diabetes on March 2, 1985. That ailment was a consequence of life-threatening surgery in 1968 which removed his pancreas, and episode recounted in detail in his book A Second Birthday.

As a Christian, he viewed his vocation as a commitment, bestowed upon him in baptism, to a lifelong struggle against the "powers and principalities", which he believed systemic evil is sometimes called in the New Testament, or "Power of Death". He proclaimed that being a faithful follower of Jesus means to declare oneself free from all spiritual forces of death and destruction and to submit oneself single-heartedly to the power of life. In contrast to most younger liberal Protestant theologians of his time, Stringfellow insisted on the primacy of the Bible for Christians as they undertook such precarious and inherently dangerous work. This placed him not within the camp of evangelicalism, but that of neo-orthodoxy, particularly the part of that school influenced by the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who made a rare compliment to Stringfellow on his only visit to the US. Yet others might classify him as a harbinger of the later liberation theology during the 1970s and 1980s. Although, to be clear, Stringfellow himself was ultimately critical of any self-described political theology that would allow itself to function as a closed ideology. During his lifetime, similar ideas to Stringfellow's could be found in the writings of the French critic Jacques Ellul, with whom he had an ongoing correspondence.

Stringfellow's foremost contribution to theological thought is to see in "images, ideologies, and institutions" the primary contemporary manifestations of the demonic powers and principalities often mentioned in the Bible. This outlook made him categorically suspicious of activities of governments, corporations, and other organizations, including the institutional churches, a viewpoint that placed him at odds with the nearly-ubiquitous "progressive" sentiments of the mid-20th century. In the mid-1960s, he defended Bishop James Pike against charges of heresy lodged against him by his fellow Episcopal bishops, believing them moved more by politics (i.e., appeasement of the denomination's conservatives such as Southerners and the wealthy) than serious faith.

Frank William Stringfellow (1928–1985) was an American lay theologian, lawyer and social activist. He was active mostly during the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in Johnston, Rhode Island, on April 26, 1928, he grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated from Northampton High School in 1945. He managed to obtain several scholarships and entered Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, at the age of fifteen. He later earned a scholarship to the London School of Economics and served in the US 2nd Armored Division. Stringfellow then attended Harvard Law School. After his graduation, he moved to a slum tenement in Harlem, New York City, to work among poor African Americans and Hispanics.