Month: April 1957

Pope Pius has called the Roman Catholic world to a vast missionary action. He has appealed for a special effort in Africa, where, he adds, the people face the dangers of communism. The pontiff urges the world’s more than 450 million Catholics to aid in bringing faith to others by prayer, financial help, and in the case of some, by dedication of their lives. The appeal is in an Easter encyclical letter to bishops of the church, and was made public Friday of this week. He points out the church’s recent expansion in Africa is a motive for hope. The approximate 23 million Roman Catholics in Africa include almost 10 million new members in the last seven years.

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A Jesuit educator says too many Catholic students do not want the scholastic life. The Rev. Edward Clark of Fordham University adds that instead the students use their college education to advance in industry and the professions. Father Clark has suggested greater use of scholarships and fellowships to make teaching and academic research more attractive. The comments of Father Clark were made at the annual meeting, in Milwaukee, of the Jesuit Educational Association.

The impulse to comment upon this statement is irresistible. Father Clark’s comment upon the resistance of Catholic students could as well be applied to all too many non-Catholic. Most of them want a diploma but are not beset by an urge to acquire an education in the process. But if by “scholastic life” he means teaching or the ministry, he displays how naive we school teachers are. When are we going to learn that young people in schools today are realistic without being unduly mercenary? They recognize that they live in a world where money not only talks but is indispensable in order to live. Hence, they look over industry, the professions, and teaching. What they see leads them to go into industry or some occupation other than teaching. We talk about free enterprise and the beauties of competition, but when are we going to recognize and do something about the fact that teaching must compete with other occupations? Until inducements equal to those offered by other occupations are offered to young people who want to teach, young people are not going into teaching. No amount of exhortation will substitute for the possibility offered by a job of getting ahead, not only financially but in other ways. We in Tennessee say to a college graduate who enters teaching that “If you be a good boy, work hard, watch you behavior and associations, you can hope to earn $3,000 after 15 years.” That in a society where plumbers, truck drivers, and other occupational jobs offer far more without the time and money investment of a college education. But often, young people are met only with the idea that teaching is a dedicated career. Most of us are getting rather tired of such prating. There is no apparent reason why a teacher should be dedicated or teach for dedication purposes any more than a personnel manager in industry, or newspaper editor, or a radio station owner should be dedicated. Until we stop talking such nonsense and start talking realistic sense to young people, they’re going to continue to enter industry by preference over scholastic careers, and the bewailings of the good Father Clark and others will not change that.

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The Board of Home Missions of the Congregational Christian Church has voted the largest budget in its history. For the year starting June 1, it will spend $3 million on new and needy Congregational churches in the U.S. The budget has tripled over the past 14 years.

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Commissioners of the Southern Presbyterians to that denomination’s General Assembly have approved a program for developing and training lay workers in the church. They say they need 700 lay workers right away, and about 256 new ones must be trained every year for work in Christian education. Tomorrow, the Southern Presbyterians will consider two controversial proposals about relations with other denominations. One is a request for exploring the possibilities of a merger with the Reformed Church of America, which is mostly in New England, and the other proposal is for withdrawal from the National and World Councils of the Churches of Christ. Already resolutions opposing merger have been introduced.

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President Eisenhower has urged the American Council of Judaism to bring the power of its faith to bear on the problems of our day. His message helps mark the 13th Annual Conference of the council, in New York City. The chief executive has also stated that as a religion of universal values, Judaism contributes to our national culture and the world’s spiritual resources. Well, those are safe statements and commits nobody to anything. Everybody is against sin – at least, nobody openly and earnestly advocates it.

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The Israeli government has officially recognized the Druze sect as a separate religious community. Thus Israel’s 20,000 Druze will have their own religious courts for such matters as family affairs and religious funds. Until now, the Druze were included in Israel’s Moslem community. Recently they won special rights for their members serving in the Israeli army. They had refused to obey the army call-up in protests of their status. The Druze is a mystic sect that broke away from Islam almost 1,000 years ago.

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In Vatican City last Wednesday, in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Pius received in general audience of some 20,000 Italian and foreign pilgrims who had flocked to Rome for Easter. The pilgrims included French, Belgian, British, Austrian, Dutch, Spanish, and one from the United States. Also included was a group of 2,000 nuns participating in a congress of hospital religious orders.

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Tonight in Woburn, Massachusetts, a Negro minister with two all-white congregations will be ordained at the First Baptist Church. He once served the church as associate minister. The Rev. Joseph R Washington, Jr. will be ordained, and faculty members from Andover Newton Theological School where he studied will take part in the ceremony.

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In London, England, the cornerstone of the first Mormon temple to be built in that country will be laid on May 11. The temple will be known as the London District Temple and is being built at Newchapel. Elder Richard L. Evans, of the Council of Twelve of the Church of Latter Day Saints, has been appointed to attend and officiate at the services in connection with the cornerstone laying ceremonies.

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For some five years now there has been a battle in the Illinois courts against the Chicago police censor board’s ban on the Italian film “The Miracle.” Recently, Judge Hugo M. Friend of Chicago’s appellate court reversed a lower court and ruled that the movie was not obscene. The picture, which tells the story of a simple-minded peasant woman who is seduced by man she believes is St. Joseph, has never been shown in Chicago, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1952 decision against New York’s ban on the film. It is not only remarkable, but a cause for concern, that so many people in so many places wish to appoint themselves keepers of the morals as to what people shall read, see, and hear. So, the Hitlerite do-gooders in communities all over the country are wringing their hands and shedding crocodile tears because someone is reading a book or seeing a movie which they, the would-be sensors, don’t like, or, more likely, never read or saw, but which they have “heard about.” There is a problem involved in the matter of the steady diet flowing across newsstands, through radio amplifiers, across TV screens. Much of it all is, in my judgment, merest piffle and occasionally trash. But many of you listening will call my own reading and listening diet trash. So who am I to be my brother’s keeper in the matter of literature or entertainment? We have laws against obscenity, and if a publisher or producer violates those laws, the proper way to punish him is in a court of law through due process, not by means of setting up a censorship board policeman on the beat, laymen in the community, etc. The fathers at Salem, Massachusetts, burned witches: censors of today are burning books and trying to eradicate ideas they don’t like. How conceited can we get, or who was it said, “Be not wise in your own conceit”? Censors haven’t read that one either.

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Along the same line of censorship in the written word and visual presentation is the fact that recently student organizations in two New York City municipal colleges were thwarted when they tried to provide a platform for John Gates, editor of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, during academic freedom week. Gates, who served a prison term under the Smith Act, spoke without incident before two meetings sponsored by student groups at Columbia University. First, a Queens College organization invited Gates to address it. When the Queens College Provost Bart Gates, a student forum at City College asked him to speak. This led the heads of five New York municipal colleges to vote unanimously to ban Gates from their campuses. An effort was then made to provide a suitable place for him to speak to college students at the Martinique Hotel, the protests from other groups using the hotel caused it to cancel arrangements for this meeting. Unable to find another suitable hall, the interested would-be sponsors abandoned efforts.

Well, some of us teachers at times rate student mentality and industry fairly low. But not often so low that we are afraid to subject them to presentation of views in conflict with our democratic freedoms. Anyone who knows anything about communism, communists, and the Daily Worker, if he can add two and two, can soon realize the basic dishonesty and lack of sincerity in the Party line. Communism is an idea around which all sorts of semantic gibberish has been grouped. You cannot kill an idea by burying it, but you can kill it by subjecting it to the crucible of analysis. Apparently the fathers of the New York City colleges fear that their students may learn something about the real nature of communism and have taken the position that ignorance is better than knowledge, which is a highly untenable viewpoint. Apparently they cannot distinguish between teaching about and indoctrination. Which reminds me of the University of Colorado professor who was asked by a member of the community if it were true that they were teaching communism up at the university. His reply was classic: “Yes, he said. And we also teach venereal disease, but we don’t advocate either.”

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A recent militant attack on war by the membership of the Ohio Pastor’s Association says, in formal resolutions, “We will never again sanction or participate in any war.” But won’t they? These resolutions bring to mind Mark Twain’s disquisition on the same subject.

“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one – on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances.

The loud little handful – as usual –will shout for the war. The pulpit will, warily and cautiously, object –at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there ‘ should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.”

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers – as earlier – but do not dare to say so.

And now the whole nation – pulpit and all – will take up the war cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Twain wrote before World War I, but there, unfortunately, is not any evidence to indicate that he was wrong then or now.

 

 

 

The results of another Gallup poll in the field of religion are now available. Last time, which I reported, it had to do with the differing viewpoints of British and American regarding church-going. This time, it tries to answer the question: Should churches speak out on social and political questions? Again, there are interesting contrasts between us and the British. Most Englishmen believe the church should keep out of such matters. In this country, there is a definite difference of viewpoints, with slightly more people believing that churches should speak out on social and political matters. Among the typical views expressed on the issue in this country are these:

“If the church expressed its views more it would clear a lot of people’s minds. Politics have always been a corrupt business. There are good and bad politicians and more good politicians would help affairs.”

Again: “The church cannot separate itself from the political side of life… It preaches the Gospel to the people and the preacher has a right to express his views. If the government would listen to the church there would be less corruption.”

Against the idea of churches taking an active role in these matters are such positions as:

“The church should teach the Bible and let the people govern the state outside of church.”

“If a minister is called to preach, he should not be in politics. If he is in politics, he does not have time to save souls.” (A rather curious mixture of theological jargon that may have been meaningful to the person making the statement but is by no means clear to this reader.)

“The church should teach the Bible and stay out of politics. The two don’t mix.”

Statistically, 53 percent of those in Britain said the churches should keep out of the social and political picture; 44 percent thought it should express its views; and 11 percent had no opinion.

In this country, 44 percent thought it should stay out; 47 percent said it should express its views; while 8 percent had no opinion.

An interesting variation was revealed between women’s and men’s viewpoints in this country. Most men said that churches should keep out of political matters, while a majority of women thought they should express their views.

It is difficult to see how churches can refrain from speaking out on social, economic, and political matters unless they are content to simply be academic monasteries in which, like the three monkeys, they see, speak, or hear no evil, devoting their church-going merely to mental, emotional, or what have you exercises in ritual that is removed from life and probably devoid of real meaning. Nobody but the rash would suggest that a church should espouse the cause of any political party. Probably almost all of us would be repelled by a church that did. However to say that there is no moral obligation of the church to let itself be heard on vital issues affecting the lives of people is to let it be shorn of the most important function for which it exists, that is, to bring meaning, purpose, and hope of achievement in the here and now. Wherever the church has for long remained an instrument through which men were encouraged or forced to forgo improvement in this life in the hope of something better in some imagined future one, it has become something of a dead institution, having little meaning to anyone but the spiritual and socially blind.

If religion, any religion, is to flourish in the hearts and minds of people, it must pursue a course that will make people see in it an instrument through which the lot of mankind can be improved, physically, morally, and spiritually here and now. Anything that comes afterward as a result of such improvement can be regarded as something of a bonus, for the good life is worthwhile within and for itself, and churches should help make that good life more nearly attainable. If they do not, they become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.

The newsletter of the Student Christian Fellowship of the University of Utah carries currently a comment upon the stodginess and narrowness of schoolteachers that is worth repeating here. It goes like this: “The student very often sits silently in class trying to determine the professor’s opinion so he can repeat it back on the final exam…. He would maintain his independence of thought in the classroom, but when he feels that the professor will not understand this independence and that it will result in a lower grade he becomes silent and gradually comes to feel that does not pay to think.”

If this is true, and to the degree that it is true, then we who tried to teach are committing at best a moral wrong in taking this attitude toward our students. Other things being equal, it is assumed that the professor knows more about the subject than the students generally, otherwise there would be little point in his being there. But all of us, if we are honest with ourselves, have come across students who not only knew as much about a given topic as we, but often a darn sight more. Not only that, but occasionally we have a student who can think circles around us. What are we doing to these students when our method of instruction and our attitude towards class learning consists merely in pouring into the class a portion of subject matter and then are satisfied with the results only if the student gives it back to us by rote in undigested form? Students may, and many will, forget fairly early a block of subject matter in a given course, but they are not likely to forget a course in which they are made to think, to do critical thinking out of the information they have learned. Teachers have an obligation, not only to the students, but to themselves, to stimulate students to be curious about the world around them, to want to satisfy this curiosity through learning, and to evaluate through critical thought processes what they are learning and how to relate this to the satisfaction of their curiosity. Unless this process is encouraged – even demanded – much of what goes on in the classroom is not only a farce, but is robbing the student of his right to develop his ability through classroom experiences that require the exercise and expression of his independent thinking and learning.

All of this puts important responsibility on the student, and all too many of them recoil from this responsibility because it means effort on their part. Far too many of them come to college desiring a diploma and shrinking from doing what is necessary to get an education. But even they have a right, moral as well as educational, to an opportunity for stimulation of their mental development through class experiences rigorous enough to challenge their best ability, liberal enough to encourage them to think. If they do not take advantage of such opportunity, they have no business in college, and their grades rightly should reflect this. Failure on the part of the professor to provide such an opportunity and on that of the student to profit by it, is immoral, intellectually, however smug the teacher may like to be or non-receptive the student is.

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Being a native of this section of the country, and having lived elsewhere for a rather long period of time, this reporter is in something of a unique position to look rather objectively at the constant conflict and tensions arising among denominations, and among members of the same denomination, over the fundamental versus the modern point of view in religious beliefs. Nowhere in the United States is fundamentalism in religion more entrenched than in the South, and Johnson City, being a part of that South, has its share, maybe more, of these tensions and traditionalists who would restrict religious thinking to the 17th, 16th, or even earlier centuries. Religion, perhaps by its very nature, can change slowly, but even it must change with changing needs, or it loses its value to the people who rightly can profit by cultivation of this very important part of human existence. But how many sins do we commit in the name of religion? Cloak any idea with a religious aura or flavor, and immediately, to some people, merely to question that idea is to be an infidel, or best an agnostic. The fact is that many people, including myself, have had religious experiences that were not worth having, while many experiences not ordinarily associated with the religious realm, have had for us deep and abiding religious significance.

Traditionalists are alarmed lest the values that sustained people of the past be thrown away. They lament that sin has become behavior and that psychology has captured theology. Liberals feel that our religious needs of today cannot be reached by the dogmas of yesteryear. Traditional theology is not religious enough to meet the needs of a people whose culture is maturing fairly rapidly. The rise of liberalism in the last century or so is no more revolutionary than many previous upheavals in church history. Traditional emphasis has been more on belief than on being. The church is always been more severe with heretics than with sinners. Traditionalism seeks to reassert the past. Liberalism is dissatisfied with the past. Traditionalism emphasizes heredity; liberalism emphasizes variation and perhaps experimentation. Traditionalism holds that guidance for man is embedded in the past, that the task is to rediscover it and make man except it. Traditionalism wishes to enforce inherited beliefs and institutions. Liberalism seeks to examine its inheritance, reject what has been outgrown, and restate its religion in view of present day needs. But liberalism is not merely a restatement of old beliefs in modern terms. That is neo-orthodoxy. It is not a new collection of theological principles. If it were it would be but a new orthodoxy, which it is not. It is a method, an attitude, an approach. Traditionalism grounds truth in authority. Liberalism grounds truth in the inductive method, for that is the only reliable way we have developed thus far to determine the reliability of a supposed fact.

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And along the same line of thought comes something of a progressive evaluation of the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in a cave a few miles south of Jericho, a decade ago. It will be interesting to see if there is a consensus among students about the scrolls, and more interesting to see whether their impact will be such as to alter the relatively fixed notions that many, perhaps most, people have regarding their present tenants in religion. Very likely, to the traditionalist whose mind is already made up about everything, whatever consensus there may be about these scrolls will seem as subversive to him as the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Already two extreme views seem to be emerging among students. One is that the Dead Sea community where the scrolls were found might shed more light on Christianity than Bethlehem; the other attach relatively little major significance to them. If there is one thread of conclusion about them shared by more students than any other, it is that the scrolls may modify in some ways certain religious viewpoints, but that fundamentally, they do not alter the foundations of Christianity. Rather, they will do much to contribute to the understanding of these foundations.

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Some interesting comparisons and contrasts with respect to church-going habits among Americans and Britons are revealed in a survey by Gallup, the results of which are just out. Almost three times as many Americans attend church more or less regularly than is true of our British cousins. It was found that 51 percent of American adults attend church on some occasion during the week, while only 14 percent of the English do. Almost 40 percent of the British say they never or almost never go to church. More of them stopped going to church between 16 – 20 years of age than any other age level. One in seven Briton says he goes to church only on special occasions, such as Easter. Also, fewer Britons than Americans make a point of listening to or watching religious services on radio or television. Among the major reasons given for not attending more regularly are such stock ones as “too busy doing other things,” “just lost the habit,” “services are boring or uninteresting,” “no one else is in in the family goes,” and “find it hard to believe in Christianity.” Just what all this proves, if anything, this reporter is not sure. Certainly it would be unsafe to equate church going with belief in religion, and I do not propose to arrive at such an unequal equation.

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Well, the new federal highway system, to be built with your money and mine, will be replete with billboards, unless a miracle happens, and few of us believe in miracles, at least of the political kind. Aside from contaminating the beauty of creation by their unsightliness, these road signs make driving hazardous and thus contributes to highway deaths. But while the Senate Public Roads Subcommittee plans to draft an anti-billboard measure, even if the Senate acts, the House obviously will not. Representative George Fallon, Democrat of Maryland, heads the House Public Roads Subcommittee, and he lists himself in the congressional directory as partner in an “advertising sign business” run by his family. While this firm does not specialize, at least not yet, in roadside signs, Fallon has close ties with outdoor advertising circles in Baltimore, and perhaps elsewhere. This supposed-to-be representative of the people has already stated in advance that he does not intend even to call a meeting of his committee on the billboard issue. He insists that he wants it left to the states, which is exactly where the billboard lobby wants it, for it is easier to maneuver toward their objectives within state legislatures than within the Congress where the national spotlight can be focused upon them. There is nothing necessarily unethical about lobbying as such, but what about conflict of interests where a head of a congressional committee refuses to grant a hearing on an issue which, as a member of a firm, might be unpalatable, but who, as a member and chairman of that committee he has an obligation to see that all sides of that issue have a chance to be heard. The psychologists will call such a personality schizophrenic; some of us who are not psychologists have another term for it, but is hardly as euphemistic.

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Rumor and gossip are at times simply nuisances, but they can and too often do become menaces to business, to government, and to individuals, for the poisoned relations between people affect the well being of society. Rumor cuts across all occupational boundaries with a speed greater than that of any other human communication. Under some conditions gossip is a powerful tool for keeping society in order ethically and politically. All of us dislike to be talked about, and gossip can become vicious in small communities especially. Sociologically, gossip is the voice of the herd, thundering in our ears, telling us that the goblins of ridicule, ostracism, and punishment will get us if we don’t behave. Our culture seems to be saddled with it, for good or ill.

How does it start? It may arise from love of one’s own pet ideas. We may gossip merely to fill a gap in a tea party conversation. But whispering campaigns can also be organized to slander a public official, a business executive, or a private individual. And gossip does not exist only on the lower levels, either as to the person spreading it or the nature of the subject matter. Some high in administrative hierarchies indulge in it. It is a mulish way of thinking and acting. It rests not necessarily on evidence, but on prejudice, egoism, or a deliberate intent to spread propaganda. To indulge in gossip is to betray, unwittingly or otherwise, an immature mind, an indiscreet one, and a mind that seeks its indulgence without regard for the direful results that may be visited thereby on the victim. Those who practice the codes of the Golden Rule and the square deal refuse to be so small. Was it not a great writer who said that “He who steals my purse steals trash, but he who filches from me my good name taketh that which enricheth him not and leaves me poor indeed?”

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A Roman Catholic priest held prisoner by Red China for six years has left for home in Omaha, Nebraska. The Rev. Fulgence Gross, a Franciscan missionary, sailed from Shanghai yesterday for Hong Kong. Four more Catholic clergymen are among the eight Americans still held by the Chinese communists.

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The Vatican’s secretary of state office has denied remarks of Hungary’s communist Premier Kadar about that nation’s Roman Catholic cardinal. The premier had said Pope Pius had asked Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty to resume his post as primate of Hungary. The Vatican statement declares that Cardinal Mindszenty is still considered the primate of Hungary, even if the government prevents him from exercising his functions. The cardinal has been a refugee in the U.S. legation in Budapest for five months. The Vatican view is that there or any place else, he is still the primate.

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Religion is one reason that the U.S. State Department officials expect heavy movement of U.S. visitors into the Middle East in the next few weeks. The U.S. recently ended its ban on American travel in some Middle Eastern countries. The Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover are the religious magnets. Passover begins one week from Monday, on April 15. The following Sunday is Christian Easter. Religious observances usually cause a great influx of travelers to Jerusalem.

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Russia’s chief rabbi died recently. The end came to Solomon Shleifer in a Moscow synagogue just before the evening service. He had been chosen spiritual leader of the Jews in the Soviet Union 11 years ago when he was 57 years old. The Moscow synagogue, through his backing, recently published a new Hebrew prayer book and Jewish calendar.

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This week some 300 million persons throughout the world began a month-long religious observance. For Moslems it’s the feast of Ramadan (ram’a-dan‘), during which nothing is to be eaten or drunk in daylight hours.

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President David O. McKay says that economic progress has been good to the Church of Latter Day Saints, but he cautions against accepting the benefits of this progress without recognizing the resulting responsibilities. He has also told the church’s 127th Annual General Conference at Salt Lake City that new scientific and engineering developments have increased greatly the standard of living of many, and that this includes Mormon families. But he sees perils threatening because of that progress, declaring that “All depends on whether we can match this flow of new material power with an equal gain in spiritual forces.”

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A new Vatican ruling has produced some significant changes in the worship of the nation’s 32 million Roman Catholics. Parish priests have noted a substantial increase in the number of persons receiving Holy Communion since Pope Pius relaxed church requirements of prolonged fasting before Communion. Catholic officials say this is exactly the result the pope hoped to achieve and expressed confidence the trend toward frequent Communion will continue to grow. Under the new rules laid down by the pope there is no longer any obligation for any Catholic, priest or layman, to fast for more than three hours before taking communion – whether at morning or evening Mass.

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Vatican City: Pope Pius has advocated a social security system for the world’s farm workers. In a letter to Cardinal Rodriguez, of Santiago, Chile, the pope said the material, moral, and social living standards in the rural areas must be raised in order to avert an exodus from the fields to the cities.

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London: The unofficial Church of England newspaper, The Church Times, has called attention to the sharp division of opinion in the Council of Churches over impending British hydrogen bomb tests. The council voted to deplore the test – but by a narrow margin. Says The Times, “This division of opinion in the Council of Churches is a reflection of a genuine bewilderment. All are one in loathing the whole horrible business of these weapons of mass destruction. But it is by no means a simple matter to expect those who are responsible for the safety of these islands to jettison a means of defense.”

The British, like ourselves, are merely talking about treatment for symptoms of the disease, war. Wonder when or if they we will ever getting around to attacking the disease of war itself? There is little room for optimism that we will, or if we do, it will probably be too late.

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Cape Town, South Africa: Compulsory racial segregation in churches has come a step nearer in South Africa. The Parliament has advanced a bill making it an offense for whites and Negroes to worship in the same church. The action came only a few hours after it had been announced that a native pastor would conduct the first service Sunday by an African for a white congregation and the Dutch Reformed Church. Premier J. G. Strydom and all his government are members of the church. When we look at such stupidity as this in the name of government and religion, why is it that some Americans still wish to go on mixing church and state without regard to the basic implications of what they are doing? Of course they do it with the best intentions, but all of us have heard that the road to a reportedly undesirable place is paid with good intentions.

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Washington: Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, of New York, says he is asking all House members to help rebuild Negro churches bombed during recent racial strife in Montgomery, Alabama. Powell suggested that those who might be embarrassed at home by such gifts could send cash in a plain white envelope. He hopes to raise $100,000. The question arises: Why would anyone be embarrassed at home or anywhere else by helping repair damage by hoodlums to innocent people and their property?

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It was announced in Jackson, Tennessee, this week that the Tennessee Supreme Court had ruled that a property owner in a neighborhood may sell this property to a Negro without being liable to a lawsuit for doing so. Does this sound silly? Well, it happened. It all arose over the sale of a home in Shelby County by a white owner in an all-white neighborhood to a Negro purchaser. Suit was brought alleging that the remaining white owners sustained loss through the sale because it was “an unusually nice, quiet, all-white residential section” and that the sale did “undermine and destroy the value of plaintiff’s home” by the sale to a Negro. The bill of particulars went on to allege that the property in question was in “the heart of a most desirable, inviting and valuable white neighborhood, and the sale created a great disturbance, … upsetting the entire community and destroying both the value and desirability of the plaintiff’s home as well as that of the neighbors…”

The Supreme Court, quite properly, rejected the claim for damages. As long as we deny to a minority the right to educational opportunity, public services generally, to live where they choose and can afford, and, in short, to go about the process of living just like other Americans, we are that long failing to live up to the precepts that we often so righteously give lip-service to but by our actions deny any real belief in them. There are both undesirable and desirable characters in almost any neighborhood, but it is hardly likely that such differences are based upon race, nationality, or religion alone. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me,” and that can be applied to denial of the right to a desirable location as well any other aspect of living. No race, religion, or nationality has a monopoly on either vices or virtues.

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Nobody is more aware than this reporter of the hazards of commenting upon a book, movie or other materials which he has not seen. This, however, is based entirely on the fact that, so far, nobody has found anything good to say about the book just published by John Robinson Beal, entitled “John Foster Dulles, a Biography.” Truly amazing is the fact that analysts, commentators, reporters, reviewers, and politicians are unanimous in pointing to what must be numerous flaws, either in the writing or the behavior of the subject about which Mr. Beal wrote. I can hardly wait to read it, but from accounts of this reporting, it bids fair to rate, sooner or later, at the top of the bestseller fiction list.

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One of the remarkable features of man’s religious behavior is the unquestioning attitude he takes toward anything that is coated with a religious flavor. Thousands would willingly die to defend the Bible but have never read it. If all Bibles were suddenly destroyed, man would still be a religious animal. Strictly speaking, we Protestants have no canon. They used to print 14 books of the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments. Then the printers left them out and Protestants lost one-third of their Bible and never missed it. It is nothing new to rearrange the Bible. It has been going on since about 850 B.C. God is not in the bookbinding business. He didn’t hand the King James Bible to us – text, hasp, clasp, and binder. But in recent years the furor over the Revised Standard Version has been of huge proportions. Those creating it are either ignorant of the history of the Bible, or, more likely, have their minds closed to any questioning about the book which they have never read thoroughly and critically but which they believe in implicitly. Incidentally, this reporter prefers the King James Version for individual use, but he can see nothing profane of sacrilegious about the Revised Standard Version. In science, to refuse to examine ideas old or new is heresy; in religion, to refuse to examine ideas old or new is orthodoxy. And the ridiculous thing about it is that those of us who fumble around trying to examine religious ideas are classed by the orthodox as being iconoclasts.

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This week the National Education Association is observing what it calls its 100^th anniversary – actually its 87^th. This may be a minor point, but in education the first regard should be for meticulous accuracy, historical and otherwise. Anyway, it is a proper time for realistic appraisal of the organization, since so much has appeared in the press and over radio and television about it that is either unfounded or misleading. It has been hailed as a professional organization representing the rank and file of the classroom teachers of the nation. Actually, it is nothing of the kind, except indirectly. The association is what is rightly termed, in blunt parlance, a “company union,’ in the sense that it is dominated from the national to the local level by administrative bureaucracy. Pick up, for example, any state affiliate organ and run through the list of names on its governing board, and there will be found few if any teachers. Virtually all the names will be city or county school superintendents, principals, supervisors, or other non-classroom personnel. It is these who direct the policy of the organization: namely, that whatever is good for the administration of a school unit is good for the teachers, which may or may not be true.

I have no personal knowledge of but one instance (during the long period that I have been associated with the organization in any way) that it took a forthright stand on the principle of defense of the classroom teacher where both academic freedom and separation of church and state were involved. In that case it permitted (perhaps “bungled” is the word) the matter to become so involved that no … decision was forthcoming that clarified the issues and protected the teacher.

So, most of us go on, affiliating with it, either from pressure from above or because it is the only existing organization through which the cause of education can be pressed before public bodies, like legislatures, for example. But many of us who are in the vulnerable position of classroom teachers and who would like to feel we had a professional organization that truly represented the rank and file of the teaching occupation, find the National Education Association and its smaller affiliates sadly lacking as such an agent.