Religion: World Religious Center

Harvard University announced an important new addition to its educational plant last week. Work will begin immediately on a Center for the Study of World Religions, where believers from all over the world may live, talk and seek to understand each other's faiths. Funds for the center were supplied by an estate that insists on anonymity—the same donor who last year endowed Harvard's first professorship in world religions. And the man who occupies that chair—Canada's topflight Theologian Robert Slater—will head the new center.

For Anglican Slater, 63, a graduate of Cambridge University, who has spent 17 years in the Far East and is canon of Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal, the center is an old dream come true. In his book on the Burma Road, Guns Through Arcady (1941), Dr. Slater wrote hopefully of ". . . men who will join hands not because they hold their own faiths lightly, but because they hold them deeply, each loyal to his own tradition but anxious to understand others." The Harvard center will be housed in a two-story building with apartments for eleven married students and visiting scholars, eight single students, one visiting professor, and Dr. Slater and his wife. Each apartment will have its own kitchen so that residents may prepare their food according to their own dietary regulations. On the roof there will be a chapel, domed to admit light—"the universal symbol of all religions."