News Briefs from December 19, 1969

No Stickups Allowed

An Arizona state prison inmate who once pulled armed stickups was told to “get in there with your hands down” when he was baptized in a two-by-six-foot stock tank two feet deep.

James Carpenter, six foot six, was too tall to be immersed in a prison bathtub, and officials nixed the idea of taking him outside the facility to a nearby pond. Carpenter, 31, dubbed a “five-time loser,” is serving twenty to thirty years for armed robbery and car theft.

Reached through “Herald of Truth” radio programs, the convict sought baptism from Church of Christ minister Tommy J. Hicks of Northside Church in Coolidge.

Protestant prison chaplain Charles Surber actually performed the rite, but he “could only get one foot in the tank,” according to Hicks’s report in the Christian Chronicle, Church of Christ newspaper. A Seventh-day Adventist was immersed first, “and his hands were sticking out,” Hicks related. “We told Carpenter … the Scriptures said total immersion, and his hands couldn’t stick out.”

Living Biblically

“Learning to live biblically in a secular world means learning to give full and active support to Christian education, Christian political action, Christian labor activity, Christian anything.” These are the words of Dr. Hendrik Hart, assistant professor of philosophy at Toronto’s fledgling Institute for Christian Studies, which aims to “pull together the scattered elements of the Reformed-Evangelical community.” The ultimate goal is establishment in North America of a major new university with authentically Christian dimensions.

The institute was opened in 1967 and has this year an enrollment of ten full-time students and 98 part-timers. There are three full-time professors (with doctorates in ethics, philosophy, and political economy). The 1969 budget is $105,000. Forty per cent of the income is derived from membership fees of the more than 2,000 members of the Association for the Advancement of Christian Scholarship. The remaining funds come from individual donations, student fees, and church designations.

The institute has no official church sponsorship, but the movement behind it is part of a tradition that has its primary manifestation in the United States in the 280,000-member Christian Reformed Church. Among its heroes are two Dutch neo-Calvinists, the late Abraham Kuyper, who served at one time as prime minister of the Netherlands, and philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd of the Free University of Amsterdam.

The present program of studies is carried on without benefit of accreditation from the Ontario Department of University Affairs, but the leaders look to possible incorporation into one of the existing universities in Toronto—perhaps in the manner of the well-known Pontifical Institute (Roman Catholic) or Victoria University (United Church of Canada), both of which are related to the University of Toronto.

In the meantime, the institute frankly informs incoming students of the facts of non-accredited life: “It should be emphasized that the Institute is geared to those students who are committed to developing a Christian frame of reference without concern for accreditation and to those who have already attained degrees.”

Dow Now: No Napalm

Dow Chemical Company quit manufacturing napalm for United States armed forces last May—but the protests linger on.

In the past two months: (1) The women’s division of the United Methodist Board of Missions voted to sell more than $400,000 worth of Dow stock because of the firm’s “moral irresponsibility” in its manufacture of napalm and munitions; (2) militants calling themselves “Beavers 55” raided Dow’s Midland, Michigan, headquarters, damaging computer equipment to the tune of several thousand dollars (ten days later, eight of the group, sitting cross-legged in the pulpit of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C., “confessed” their part in the act and said they were disclosing their names to encourage similar actions); and (3) five Notre Dame University students were expelled and five others suspended after about 150 persons, led by a mini-skirted nun, blocked campus interviews by a Dow representative and routed him from the premises.

The ex post facto protests took place before Dow chairman Carl Gerstacker rather casually let it drop in a Los Angeles speech that the napalm contract had expired six months earlier. Why had the company been mum? “We win and lose contracts all the time,” shrugged President Herbert Doan, denying that Dow had purposely overbid on the controversial $9.2 million contract. (The manufacture of napalm amounted to only about one-quarter of 1 per cent of Dow’s gross sales.)

Now, American Electric of La Mirada, California, has the contract, but antiwar groups still are harrassing Dow, saying: “Your basic position hasn’t changed.”

“We make a good target, with our nice short name,” said one badgered Dow official. “If we just made paper towels, they’d get us for knocking down the tree.”

Religion In Transit

St. Peter didn’t sit there after all, a commission of engineers, scientists, and scholars concluded last month about a revered chair resposing in St. Peter’s Church of Rome. The widely venerated “chair of Peter” dates to 875 and was probably a gift to Pope John VIII by the Roman emperor Charles the Bald, according to the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.

The 1,000th broadcast of the Hour of Decision will be aired December 28. The program is heard by 20 million people each Sunday over 713 stations in the United States and 216 elsewhere.… NBC will carry an hour-long program from Washington (Episcopal) Cathedral on Christmas featuring the first major use of the Consultation on Church Union liturgy.

All thirteen Negro students at Presbyterian-affiliated Lees Junior College in Jackson, Kentucky, dropped out of school because of a shooting incident that followed a basketball game; Lees canceled its remaining games after the team was left with only two players.

The Tennessee Board of Equalization ruled that Nashville property owned by the Methodist Publishing Company, the National Baptist Convention, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Seventh-day Adventists and used for printing operations is subject to taxation.

Police raided a Garden Grove, California, Catholic church and found a crowd of 400 playing blackjack, chuck-a-luck, and shooting craps. A bar was in operation. Gambling equipment and $2,000 in cash were confiscated at the church fund-raising party.

The United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education has slashed its 1970 budget $1 million because of declining giving and will operate on $6 million next year.

Sixty-two Louisville, Kentucky, retail firms lost a bid to remove a circuit court order limiting their Sunday operations in time to take advantage of the Christmas-shopping rush.

The sex education controversy continues to spread across the nation: By the end of last month twenty-seven state legislatures had either taken up the issue or had agreed to do so in their next session.

Brigham Young University’s rigid Mormon doctrine caused picketing and off-field strife at most of the school’s football games this fall. The entire nine-school Western Athletic Conference was thrown into turmoil over the alleged racism (Mormonism forbids blacks to hold the priesthood), and Stanford University said it won’t compete with BYU teams.

Missionary Baptist Pastor James H. Bishop said he was “willing to lay down my life for the cause” last month, referring to a fight he is spearheading to invalidate the property transfer of 900 acres (Bishop’s church is surrounded by one of the tracts in question) to the Black Muslims. The twenty-two thousand-resident St. Clair County in rural Alabama is up in arms over the controversy.

A $1 million budget cut and an overhaul in operations was voted by the directors of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Denominational vice-president Raymond Hopkins said the 200,000-member church still will be about $500,000 in the red at the end of the fiscal year.

The Vatican threatened last month to withdraw press accreditation from any correspondent thought to have “an incorrect attitude” toward the Pope, the Holy See, or the Roman Catholic Church.

Twenty-one suicide and other crisis intervention telephone counseling centers are in operation in seven countries, and twenty-five more are scheduled to open next year.

Personalia

“Lutheran Hour” radio preacher Oswald Hoffmann and New York Archbishop Terence Cardinal Cooke will participate in Christmas Eve celebrations for U. S. troops at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon.

Dr. Arnold T. Olson, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America and the National Association of Evangelicals, has been named one of seven vice-presidents of the United Bible Societies.

Former American Baptist Convention president Carl W. Tiller, a layman who is a U. S. Budget Bureau special adviser, was named president of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention last month.

Tiny Tim, alias Herbert Kauhry, the long-haired and high-voiced singer, testified in an interview by This Week that Christ had guided him to fame. He said Christ told him not to cut his hair and “that’s why I believe my success was … the biggest miracle that ever happened in show business.”

Dr. William Larson of Minneapolis has been named head of the United States National Committee of the Lutheran World Federation.

Jesuit priest Richard A. McCormick, 47, professor of moral theology at Bellarmine School of Theology in North Aurora, Illinois, was named the outstanding Catholic theologian of the year by the Catholic Theological Society of America.

The Vatican investigation of the orthodoxy of prominent Catholic philosopher and writer Dr. Leslie Dewart was closed with a “no condemnation” verdict, but he was asked to withhold further editions of his controversial book The Future of Belief.

A U. S. attorney and lawyers for NASA tried to button down Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s space suit last month, claiming that the self-proclaimed atheist was hair-splitting and lacked the necessary standing to sue the government. Mrs. O’Hair, whose request for a a ban on the broadcast of prayers by American astronauts was refused by a federal court, contended that the oaths required of the three judges made it impossible for her to get a fair trial.

Evangelist Billy Graham (a Southern Baptist) received the Anti Defamation League’s B’nai B’rith Award for outstanding citizenship last month in Temple Beth-El, Charlotte, North Carolina. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Cuthbert Allen, past president of Belmont Abbey College and a personal friend of Graham’s, presented the award.

World Scene

The College Singers, a gospel group from Cameroon—the first cultural-exchange group from that West African nation ever to tour the United States—sang in seventy U. S. and Canadian cities this fall, including a Capitol rotunda performance in Washington, D. C., and an appearance at the United Nations’ General Assembly. Sponsored by the North American Baptist General Conference, the nineteen students from NAB mission schools in Cameroon are mission converts.

Culminating forty years of merger talks, the 600,000-member Methodist Church in Southern Asia (largest overseas unit of the United Methodist Church) has voted to join the proposed Church of North India, already approved by six of seven participating denominations.

Only 475 candidates for the priesthood entered Roman Catholic French seminaries this year, down from 810 in 1968 … According to Vatican radio, India is “the only country in the world” that shows a net increase in Catholic priestly vocations.

American-born Episcopal Bishop Dillard H. Brown, Jr., of Monrovia, Liberia, was shot to death by a pistol-wielding intruder in the Episcopal Church center there. Diocesan business manager Claude Nadar, a Lebanese, was killed by the gunman, also, and the bishop’s secretary was critically wounded. Investigation suggested the motive was revenge.

Some 500 French young people heard the gospel message during a riverboat excursion on the Seine sponsored by The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) last month.

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