Religion: Words & Works

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¶ In the steel-boom area of the Delaware Valley in Bucks County, Pa., a group of Quakers set up a project that would have warmed the spirit of William Penn: a development of 140 ranch houses at Concord Park, not less than half to be reserved for Negroes. Nearby Levittown (with 10,000 homes) and the somewhat smaller Fairless Hills, serving the same steel area, do not permit Negroes.

¶ The U.S. is threatened from within as well as from without, said the Roman Catholic bishops of the U.S. in a statement issued after their annual meeting in Washington, D.C. "The enemy is atheistic materialism, whether it be entrenched in the organs of a foreign state or in one of our own domestic institutions . . . There is not yet [in the U.S.] a deliberate turning away from God, but there is an excessive preoccupation with creatures . . . [which] reveals itself as secularism in politics and government . . . avarice in business and in the professions . . . paganism in the personal lives and relations of all too many men and women."

¶ The North Carolina Baptist State Convention adopted a report of its Religious Liberty Committee urging U.S. Baptists to oppose the teaching of religious subjects in public schools as contrary to the principle of a separated church and state. Giving state support to parochial schools, said Democratic Congressman Tom Steed of Oklahoma in backing the report, "is giving away part of our freedom. To remove, destroy, weaken, or change our conception of the separation of church and state will . . . prove our undoing."

¶ "Man would be better off if the hope of a material heaven and the fear of a physical hell were completely brought to an end," said Rabbi Ira E. Sanders of Little Rock's Temple B'nai Israel. "The earth is the only place to fix our fancy," he continued, though he admitted a "reasonable hope that in some form, yet unknown, man is immortal." But the traditional heaven and hell "manufactured out of hatred and fear, are ... as unreal and unnatural as the 'happy hunting ground' of the Indian and the warm place in the earth pictured by the Eskimos."