Religion: Words & Works

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¶Some 30,000 Jehovah's Witnesses descended on New York City for a five-day Triumphant Kingdom Assembly, the fifth of eleven Witness assemblies that will take place throughout the world this year, heard the imminence of Armageddon preached in flower-decked Yankee Stadium, spent their spare time making door-to-door efforts to convert "pagan" New Yorkers. Meanwhile, their brethren in Vermont decided to abandon plans to use Burlington's Memorial Auditorium for a meeting in October after veterans' groups, bristling at the Witnesses' refusal to salute the flag or bear arms, threatened to throw up a "human chain" around the auditorium to keep them out.

¶The National Red Cross Society of China invited Mrs. Addie Rigney, 77, of Chicago, to visit her son, the Rev. Harold W. Rigney, 54, onetime U.S. Air Force chaplain, postwar rector of Fu Jen University in Peking and a prisoner of the Chinese Reds since 1951. But Mrs. Rigney was refused a passport by the State Department, was told that the priest's problem was on the agenda of the Geneva Conference.

¶The Christian Century's columnist, Simeon Stylites (real name: the Rev. Halford E. Luccock), observed that "some whirling dervishes of white supremacy" in South Africa and the U.S. seem to have discovered a new version of the Bible: the Jim Crow Bible. Sample verses: "Suffer little white children, and forbid them not, to come unto me [Matthew 19:14]"', "Come unto me, all ye Caucasians that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest [Matthew 11:28]."