Heresy Hunters are on the war-path again, we are told, their latest attack being directed against Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick…who is charged with rejecting the four great doctrines of Christianity -the virgin birth, the inspiration of scriptures, the atonement of Jesus, and Christ’s second coming…
The well-loved Christian author Helen Walker Homan wrote this very charming essay about Saint Peter:
Saint Peter knows that the very fact that he, of all the Apostles, has been the most frequent subject of jokes by mankind, is only an added proof that he has been the most beloved of mankind.
This is the very succinct response from the Religion Editor at Theodore Roosevelt’s magazine, The Outlook when asked for an article on the modern views of the Genesis and how the Sunday school teachers of 1901 might best address the topic. The article has been reduced to the bare bones for the sake of brevity.
Pretty girl’s pictures help sell toothpaste, cigarettes and magazines, so why shouldn’t they help sell religion? This logic is being applied by churchmen producing the new TV series called, This is the Life.
After all – it’s no sin to be pretty – quoth Reverend R.C. Wuerffel, Chairman of the Lutheran TV Production Committee.
It was indeed divine inspiration that graced the craniums of these producing-churchmen employed by the Lutheran Hour Ministries – this television program was an absolute success – appearing first in 1952 and wrapping in 1988. Some of the pretty faces they employed along the way belonged to Annette O’Toole, Kathy Garver, Angie Dickinson, Lisa Pelikan, Mala Powers and Lynn Whitfield.
Here is an article concerning the persecution of that Protestant faith so unique to American shores: the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religion that numbered 50,000 world-wide in 1936. The attached article reported on the school expulsions of various assorted young followers for failing to show proper respect to the American flag on campus:
A year ago the first such case, in Pennsylvania, startled the newspapers. ‘If you kill me I won’t salute!’ quavered an eleven year-old schoolboy. He was expelled. Soon after, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, a teacher was was dismissed for refusing to honor ‘the flag of horror and hate.’
Many and myriad are the reasons Roman Catholics and Protestants worship differently – one of them is the idolization of the Virgin Mary.
This article from 1897 outlines the reasoning behind this uniquely Roman Catholic brand of piety that emphasizes the Virgin Mary while numerous other Christian faiths have long held that this extracurricular devotion merely serves to upstage Christ and His message. The column is composed of numerous passages from an open letter written by Pope Leo XIII (1878 – 1903) clarifying the need for the Catholics to understand the importance of the Virgin Mary:
From all eternity He chose her to become the mother of the Word who was to clothe Himself in human flesh…
At the thirty-fifth annual church congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1919) clergy members seemed to agree that Christian leaders were fully complicit in the recently ended war and were guilty of abandoning Christianity for patriotism:
Christianity has betrayed itself body and soul.
When W.W. II started, Americans went back to church…
In 1900 people wanted to know why men didn’t like going to church…
Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era
A report from The Literary Digest revealed that only one man out of every nine attended Sunday services with any regularity in 1929. The article quotes one wounded clergymen who predicted doom for the American culture as a whole, and interviewed an assorted number of church-goers of the male variety who offered a number sound reasons to attend weekly services, none of them having anything to do with the Gospels. However 317 out of 320 interviewed all concurred that their participation helps them attain a sense of the presence of God in their lives.
Click here to read an article from 1900 about why men dislike going to church.
Bertram Goodhue (1869 – 1924) was a popular American architect who was highly praised for his mastery of the Gothic Revival style of architecture, which won him many of the finest commissions that society had to offer any architect during the high-water mark of the WASP ascendancy.
This article appeared in The Literary Digest just as his design for St. Thomas Church on New York’s Fifth Avenue was nearing completion and he shared with the journalist his insights as to how he designs churches:
Sometimes, of course, the cloistral effect is needed, in a monastery, for instance. And the church must always have solemnity, but not coldness. I have tried in my work to express this quality of invitation, together with sanctity and a degree of magnificence quite undreamed of in my craftsman days.
A short article from 1935 reporting on the near-death experience of a British gardener named John Puckering who insisted that when his heart ceased beating for four and a half minutes during the course of a complicated surgery his soul slipped away, and joined a heavenly company…
A second article dealing with the same subject can be read here.
