Words & Works

P: Increasing automation, leading to a shorter work week, may force churches to shift their major weekly services from Sunday to Thursday night by 1970, the Rev. Irving R. Murray, a Unitarian, told a Congregational audience in Lexington, Mass. "It is, indeed, arrogant of churches to assume they have the right to impose the village, agricultural type of Sabbath of ancient times upon modern, urban, industrial people. Intelligent churchmen will begin today to prepare for tomorrow's three-day weekend." P:The Christian Century showed itself unimpressed by Americans who dusted off their Bibles or boosted Bible sales as the result of a Bible-quoting grandmother's successful appearance on TV's quiz show, The $64,000 Question (TIME, July 25)."If a lipstick manufacturer thinks it worth $32,000 to be told the names of eight of the twelve disciples, or that Alphaeus was the father of James the Less--well, that's all right for a quiz program," said the Century. "But it does not represent the sort of 'knowing the Bible' which has any deep religious significance. All it means is that people like to play games. The Bible is not a game." P:The U.S. will have 70,000 new churches and synagogues costing $6 billion in the next ten years, predicted New York's Dr. C. Harry Atkinson of the National Council of Churches. In the same decade, he said, 12,500 other church buildings will be built at a cost of more than a billion dollars. P: Biblical statements about heaven and hell should not be taken too seriously because they may express only "opinions current at the various dates of their utterance," Canon J. S. Bezzant, dean of St. John's College, Cambridge, told the annual Conference of Modern Churchmen at Oxford. "The waking nightmares which produced the hideous pictures of hell . . . can only now be regarded as having issued from diseased minds . . On the other hand, much of the traditional imagery descriptive of heaven suggests what no one any longer desires.If hell offends, heaven bores . . ."; Canon Bezzant's recommendation to the clergy: "To say little or nothing about . . . how the dead live, or with what body they will hereafter come. These are matters belonging to the other side of death, and there is no more reason to suppose we can imagine them reliably than we have to suppose a caterpillar on a leaf can imagine what it is like to fly in the air."

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