Who might we consider “the greatest moral teacher of our time”? Every country and culture surely has its own candidate, and probably most of us can volunteer our own examples from our own milieu. But some people get more votes than others, and in the U.S. context, the great peace activist Colman McCarthy’s opinion counts more than yours. On whom did he bestow the title? Robert Coles.

McCarthy obviously knew Coles, the doctor, writer, sociologist and historian who died on June 4, for many decades, as the two were frequent enough collaborators and fellow travelers in pricking the conscience of America. However, one could argue that there was a time in the United States when Robert Coles came close to a household name. Certainly the editors of America knew him well—even before he became a columnist for the magazine. 

Though trained as a psychiatrist, Coles was widely recognized as a storyteller nonpareil—and his fellow storytellers recognized that was where his talents were most visible. The New York Times obituary last week quoted another physician, the novelist Walker Percy, on Coles: “He treads a narrow path between theorizing and novelizing and emerges as what in fact he is: physician, and a wise and gentle one. He is doctor to the worst of our life.” (Which leads me to another question: Was Coles one of the inspirations for Dr. Thomas More, the protagonist of Percy’s novels Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome? The latter novel is actually dedicated to Coles.)

“From the 1960s through the 1990s, Coles was revered by succeeding generations of young people (including mine) for his empathic writings about everyday experience in an America divided by race and class,” wrote Timothy Noah in a tribute in The New Republic, where Coles had once been a contributing editor.  

Born in Boston in 1928, Coles attended the prestigious Boston Latin School and then Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1950. Though by some accounts he wanted to be a writer, the physician-poet William Carlos Williams convinced him to study medicine instead. Coles earned his medical degree from Columbia University with a specialty in child psychiatry. In 1952, he volunteered at the Catholic Worker in New York City and met Dorothy Day, who would become a longtime friend and mentor.

He enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1958, serving as a psychiatrist in Biloxi, Miss., for two years; upon discharge in 1960, he finished his training in Boston and moved to New Orleans with his new bride Jane Hollowell. New Orleans at the time was the scene of significant strife around efforts to integrate public schools, including the famous case of Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old who had to be protected by federal agents against an angry mob to attend school. Coles got to know Bridges and her family and began to write for The Atlantic Monthly and other journals on the situation in New Orleans; he would eventually develop those writings and topics into the first volume of his famous five-book Children of Crisis series. In 1973, the first two volumes earned him the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Coles was famous (sometimes infamous) in his writings for not reaching general conclusions or making a unified central argument; many of his books meandered beyond 500 pages that involved lengthy quotes and conversations—not all of them necessarily concerned with scrupulous accuracy, as reviewers of his books on Dorothy Day and Bruce Springsteen later noted. His main concern often seemed to be reaching the empathetic heart of readers, establishing a connection between them and his subjects rather than establishing a thesis. 

Coles first began writing for America in 1972, and contributed essays and book reviews for the next several decades. In 1996, he began writing a regular column, “Secular Days, Sacred Moments.” The theme was…well, it’s hard to say what the throughline of the column was for the next three years. One was on our nationwide affection for Holden Caulfield; another was on Shakespeare’s “Othello”; a number were on psychiatry and mental health; so too did he write on Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and of course many were on the moral and mental experiences of children in the United States, particularly in its otherwise unnoticed areas.

For all of the aforementioned decades, Coles was also writing books—as well as articles for countless journals, Catholic and not. At the same time, he was teaching at Harvard on subjects like “Moral and Social Inquiry,” where the syllabus included as much Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor as it did social science or more standard textbook materials. He would become somewhat famous among Harvard’s students for his eclectic syllabi and imaginative courses, if perhaps less well esteemed by fellow professors. (He was not, Noah noted, “especially admired by his academic colleagues because he lacked ‘rigor.’”)

“The walls of his small office at Harvard were hung with pictures of his moral heroes,” wrote the journalist and former Newsweek religion editor Kenneth Woodward last week in Commonweal (for whom Coles also wrote over several decades). “Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in politics; Anna Freud and [Erik] Erikson, his mentors in child psychiatry; and some of the writers he most admired: James Agee, Walker Percy, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, and Georges Bernanos, whose fictional French country priest, he said, haunted him. (He wrote two books on Day and one on Weil.) Also scattered about were images of the Madonna and child.”

Coles died in hospice care in Lincoln, Mass., at the age of 97. He is survived by his three sons and four grandsons; his wife Jane died in 1993. Coles was the author of more than 60 books and hundreds of articles; he also served as a mentor and counselor for countless fellow pilgrims working on the margins of American society, including many in the antiwar, civil rights and anti-poverty movements. He was also—as the name of his column for America indicated—someone for whom secular politics and society did not preclude the suffusion of the sacred within them.

In 1995, James Martin, S.J., solicited responses from numerous contributors to the question: “How do I find God?” The responses, published in America (and eventually as a standalone book), included the following from Coles:

We find God, I think, through others—through the love we learn to offer them, through the love we learn to receive from them—no small achievement and, indeed, a life-long effort. We find God with difficulty—the obstacle of pride is always there, with its various forms of expression: self-preoccupation, self-importance, smugness, arrogance, pretentiousness, in George Eliot’s phrase, “unreflecting egoism”—all of that hinders, squelches the movement of the mind, heart, soul outward, toward others, whom we might come to know, trust, love, were we less locked into the prison of the self. God, then, is the great Other and comes to each of us, lives for each of us, insofar as we can find him through our daily lives: how they are lived with our fellow human beings.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Sagrada Familia: The Chains,” by Rachel Lott. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.