Letters from Prison

In sharp contrast to today's brand of "God wants you to be rich" spirituality, religious figures a century ago were asking the opposite question: Does Jesus frown on material wealth? One of the most outspoken voices so wondering was Bouck White, a Congregationalist minister in New York City, and in 1914, he was actually arrested and convicted on a trumped-up charge of disorderly conduct for continually posing this query to the privileged of Manhattan, which only turned him into a cause c l bre among the city's newspaper editorialists and social activists-and the bane of the Church hierarchy and economic elite. Collected here, his communications to the outside world during his incarceration serve as impassioned calls for justice not only for himself but for the downtrodden in an era of economic upheaval-and today, White's words remind us of a time not so long ago when popular champions of the poor and working class dared to risk their own well-being in the name of a higher cause. American minister and author BOUCK WHITE (1874-1951) also wrote Quo Vaditis (1903), The Book of Daniel Drew (1910), The Call of the Carpenter (1911), The Mixing (1913), and The Carpenter and the Rich Man (1914).