Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

• Author: McCarthy, Coleman

In the early church, followers of Rabbi Christ the lawbreaker were known not as Christians--originally a term of derision first used in 70 A.D.--but as rebels who practiced nonviolence and the compassionate communism of sharing wealth according to need. Imprisonment was often the price for trying to recruit others to the creed. A major testimony of faith was one's jail record.

These days, Christians are still being arrested or jailed, but for different reasons: preachers for money fraud, anti-abortionists for killing doctors, and a Catholic bishop in Minnesota for drunk driving.

For a reminder that the standards of the early church have not entirely vanished, Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady offer Daniel and Philip Berrigan. The authors are seasoned journalists who interviewed broadly for the book, are sensitive to spiritual nuances usually lost on the secular media, and who artfully tell the stories of two of this century's most ardent keepers of the faith and sharers of the peace.

Daniel, now 75, and Philip, 73, are described as leaders of the "Catholic Resistance," a band of dissenters from conventional state and church pieties. They continue "to act with a disciplined nonviolence--even though they are bound to exchange a sizable chunk of their freedom for deeds leaving little discernible trace on the institutions they would subvert"

Of the two, Daniel is better known: a poet and playwright; a writer of rich, metaphorical prose; a teacher taking stints in classrooms from Colorado College to Loyola University in New Orleans; and a priest, steadfast in the spiritual service he began as an 18-year-old seminarian in 1939. The future resister of Caesar's wars heartily embraced the cassocked military regime of Rome's chosen, the Jesuits. Ordained in 1952 by Richard Cardinal Cushing, the new Father Berrigan found himself on a brief assignment in Europe, including a military chaplaincy in West Germany. Up through the early '60s, he taught in high school and college, sending students into Catholic working houses of hospitality in hopes of radicalizing them to side with the ideals of nonviolence and with the poor, as he himself one day would.

Philip Berrigan, a former World War II soldier, joined the Josephites in 1950 after graduating from the College of the Holy Cross. As a Josephite priest in an order founded as a "Negro apostolate," Berrigan was sent into black parishes in Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans. He roiled the waters by applying...