Word: religion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scene is a shabby Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Mineola, L.I., and the tenth man is a young lawyer with no faith in religion, or even in life itself, who has been brought in off the street to make a quorum for morning prayers. Except for an aged rabbi, even the elderly Jews who show up largely lack faith; they come out of habit or boredom, or as to a club where they can gossip and wisecrack and argue various isms. One of them brings his 18-year-old granddaughter, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of asylums...
...brand-new magazine is on sale this week on Russia's newsstands. Title: Science and Religion. Editorial slant: religion ridiculed in village-atheist terms, scientists chided for any signs of backsliding from faithlessness. (One author accuses leftish U.S. Astronomer Harlow Shapley of attempting to reconcile God and the expanding universe, advises him: "Your hopes are vain, Professor Shapley!") The magazine's lead article is by Britain's spry old Philosopher-Mathematician Bertrand Russell, 87, who asks: "Has religion made a useful contribution to civilization?" His answer: No, except for helping to establish the calendar and inducing...
Baptist "Subversion." The importance of Science and Religion lies not in its contents but in its appearance at this late date after God's official demise in the U.S.S.R. And this is not the only evidence that religion in Russia is far from limited to dying-off old folks. Moscow's Izvestia is devoting column after indignant column to the "subversive"' doings of Russian Baptists-grown from 100,000 before the Revolution to about 500,000 today. Typical of Izvestia's reports from all over is a letter telling how one Lukeria Sevchuk was converted...
Meat in the Soup. Similar evidence that religion in Russia is alive is provided by one of the latest Soviet novels to reach the West (via an Italian translation). The Miraculous Icon is a 19th century moral tale in reverse: hero sinks down and down into the depths of Christianity, is saved in the nick of time by conversion to clear-eyed atheism...
...finds a buried icon of St. Nicholas near an abandoned church. From a larger village nearby comes Father Dmitry to read the Bible ("All listened attentively with heavy breathing, but in every face it was plain to read that they understood not one word"). Rodka is finally hooked by religion when he hears awesome reverberations in the church tower just before midnight each night and he staggers home convinced that God exists, muttering: "No more future, no more happiness, all finished." (The noises in the tower turn out to be echoes from the 11:50 express...