A Right To Die?
Mrs. Jesse Jones, a 25-year-old mother, is contesting a court order which doctors credit with saving her life. She and her husband filed a petition in the U.S. Circuit Court of Washington, D. C., to quash the order under which doctors at Georgetown University Hospital subjected her to a blood transfusion against her will. The couple belong to the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect.
Protestant Panorama
United Presbyterians will take up a special offering next February 9 to provide bail and meet other legal costs for those arrested in civil rights demonstrations. The money will also be used to relieve the financial distress of the families of those arrested.
Louisville Presbyterian Seminary dedicated its new $4,500,000 campus last month. Nine buildings are located on the site overlooking a park.
Church of the Nazarene is climaxing a quadrennium of evangelistic emphasis with an eleven-day national campaign to distribute more than two million copies of the Gospel of John.
A secretariat for the North American Christian Convention is being established in Cincinnati. Leonard G. Wymore was named convention director.
The first Lutheran church buildings in Ghana will be built near Accra and in Kumasi. Missionaries of the Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America started work in Ghana three years ago. There are now four congregations meeting in public school buildings.
Miscellany
The Tunisian government ordered the North Africa Mission, an evangelical group with headquarters in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, to stop seeking converts among Muslims. The mission’s bookstore in Tunis was ordered closed and its Bible correspondence courses discontinued.
The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church in Greece, in a surprise decision, unanimously agreed to the establishment of a “dialogue” with the Roman Catholic Church “on equal terms.” The action amounted to endorsement of an agreement reached at the Pan-Orthodox Conference held at Rhodes in September. The assembly’s decision came as a surprise because the Holy Synod, top administrative body of the church in Greece, had been strongly opposed to holding the Pan-Orthodox Conference and declined representation.
Dallas Theological Seminary and Graduate School of Theology is establishing a department of world missions with authority to offer a major in the field toward the master of theology degree.
The closing of 200 churches and prayer houses in one section of the western Ukraine in the past three years was reported last month by the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda.
The Christian Crusade led by Billy James Hargis scheduled an all-night radio marathon with the emphasis on “encouraging the conservatives of America to fight communism through conservative Christianity.”
Mrs. Madalyn Murray, successful litigant in the U. S. Supreme Court’s Bible reading-prayer case, filed suit in Baltimore against tax exemptions for church-owned property.
The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Lord’s Day Act in rejecting an appeal of two Hamilton bowling-alley operators who were convicted and fined for opening on Sunday.
The U. S. Senate passed a college aid bill with an amendment designed to test the constitutionality of grants and loans to church-related schools. Biggest hurdle for the measure, review by a House-Senate conference, is still ahead.
Deaths
DR. CHARLES DUELL KEAN, 53, writer on religion and rector of Epiphany Episcopal Church, Washington, D. C.; in Washington.
DR. JACOB S. PAYTON, 79, retired Methodist minister known for his editorial work with the Christian Advocate; in Arlington, Virginia.
Cigarette vending machines on the sprawling Columbia University campus in New York now carry a warning that “there is medical evidence that cigarette smoking impairs health” (see editorial, page 28). The notices were posted at the request of the university by the company which services the machines. The trend toward recognizing the dangers of smoking also was evident in the fact that, beginning this fall, most cigarette manufacturers withdrew advertising from college newspapers.
Personalia
Dr. Ralph M. Johnson resigned as president of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School to become pastor of First Baptist Church, Everett, Washington.
Dr. Clate A. Risley is resigning as executive secretary of the National Sunday School Association, effective December 31.
Robert Geerdes named general director of the John Haggai Evangelistic Association.
Miss Carman St. John Wolff named director of the Protestant Episcopal Church’s Department of Christian Education.
Dr. Francis E. Wright named president of Union University (Baptist), Jackson, Tennessee.
Dr. Robert Markwick Skinner named vice-president of Princeton Theological Seminary.
A Methodist minister apparently ousted as chaplain of the North Carolina Senate said he would continue to be on hand “every morning with my prayer ready.” The Rev. E. C. Dunham said that the Senate president had no authority to fire him during a special session.
James F. Bunting, Methodist layman, named general secretary of the National Board and National Council of YMCA’s in America.
They Say
“We don’t know whether to pray in it, for it, or at it.”—Ben Martin, Air Force football coach, on the academy’s ultra-modern chapel.
“We think it is manifestly unfair to let tax-free organizations fight us [since] they themselves produce none of the revenue required to run our government.”—Statement of the Texas Brewers’ Institute protesting a Federal Communications Commission permit for a new broadcasting station, KDRY, to be operated by temperance leader Sam Morris.
