President Richard Nixon was a nasty man surrounded by nasty minions. While best known for Watergate these henchman had a big bag of dirty tricks. One of them was the clever Charles Colson who admitted he would run over his grandmother to fulfill his questionable responsibilities. As smart as he was he went down with the president and spent seven months in prison. To everyone's surprise he converted to evangelical Christianity and after his release he began a prison ministry which is stilll going strong. Colson also wrote a biography called Born Again which sold millions.
Colson died over the weekend at the age of 80. I really didn't care for Colson's theology which at times seemed to be too strongly connected to conservative American values -- surprise, surprise. I did admire that he turned his tenacity and intelligence to work with people who are the lepers of our society, those in prisons. Interesting that I would write twice about prisons this week for very different reasons.
Did any of you follow the Colson story through the years? Yes, I realize that a fair number of you weren't born during th Nixon era, but don't rub it in!
I had read about him, though I didn't realize he was as actively involved as he was in prison communities.
ReplyDeleteI guess this kind of ministry is the silver lining of the cloud in question. As for the Nixon administration, its odious influence stretched into the last decade (Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney each cut their political teeth as rookies in Tricky Dick's cabal of losers.)