David G. Duggan

Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living.” By this measure, David Duggan’s life has been of great worth. His ability to dig deep into his soul and bring scripture to life bursts forth from the pages of “Glimpses of Grace, Reflections of a Life in Christ."

Born in a southern segregated hospital and baptized by a Navy chaplain, raised in the Chicago suburbs, a college graduate at 20, weekly newspaper editor at 23, New York lawyer at 28, Duggan has spent his entire life answering the question: “What would God have me do?” In his teen years he was a gymnast, pursuing the physical ideal that sport demands. He represented his high school in academic contests (like College Bowl) and kept up with weekly worship, memorizing many of the prayers in the Prayer Book kept in the pews. He never lost his faith that the Jesus of the Gospels was the author of our salvation, whose Heavenly Father didn’t let a sparrow fall to the ground without His knowing of it.

As a lawyer, Duggan prosecuted corrupt police officers in New York City, defended corporations and represented aggrieved investors who were victims of fraud. He also represented indigent criminal defendants charged with drug conspiracies and other federal crimes. He saw up close the problem of mass incarceration of persons of color serving lengthy sentences based on flimsy evidence which robbed whole sections of the Chicago landscape of adult men. One of his clients was the first person to be released from Illinois prison after the state’s Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission had found that widespread Chicago police brutality led to false confessions and wrongful convictions. Along the way he has written extensively about the problems in the legal system. His articles have appeared in the Illinois Bar Journal, the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin and the New York Law Journal.

But always there was his faith which he chronicled in “Faithwalk,” an award winning column published in the Anglican Advance, the newspaper for Episcopalians in the Chicago Diocese. In 2002 he won the top prize awarded by the Associated Church Publishers for devotional essays, complementing several other prizes he had won earlier. Other essays were published in The Living Church, a magazine devoted to the “broad church” movement in the Episcopal denomination. They were later compiled in “Glimpses of Grace, Reflections of a Life in Christ,” (Westbow, 2013) and tell how God has used Duggan to accomplish His purpose.

Duggan has had a life outside the practice of law and the formation of Christian literature. Still an avid tennis player, some 20 years ago he won the Chicago Park District Men’s 45-and older tennis tournament, and now plays recreationally. He also writes for the World Association of International Studies, a Stanford-originated group of scholars that bills itself as the oldest on-line community (on the Internet since the 1990s). His articles on politics, sports, arts and religion are among the most widely-read and re-published articles among that group’s members. And in his spare time, he does Sudoku puzzles, and crosswords, enjoying along the way glasses of Scotch, one of God’s gifts to this world.