Word: oftener
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...clergyman is a liberal in theology, which may mean that he is uncertain about the importance and accuracy of the Bible or even about the urgent need for biblical teaching. Seminary instruction in homiletics (the techniques of sermon preparation) is generally good. But to conservative critics this work is often undermined by Bible faculties. "Seminarians are not sure God is speaking in the Bible," says James Boice of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. "The professors think of the Bible as a collection of human documents. Centuries ago, even the heretics believed the Bible was the Word of God; they...
...ingratiating, please-understand urgency, communicated by eyes and face as he leans out over the congregation. Since he finds that laymen always make the same two complaints about sermons (too long, too short on humor), he tries to oblige, honing his Sunday morning sermons to 22 minutes, often putting them on tape cassettes for memorization...
Gomes' congregation necessarily changes with each graduation. He is naturally as concerned as his student listeners about attitudes toward the future. He notes: " 'What are you doing next year?' can be, and often is, regarded as a hostile question." Gomes makes cheerful academic jokes (on Ascension Day: "It is the Lord who graduates") and will quote Ogden Nash or Woody Allen as freely as Crisis Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But he offers no easy optimism or simple uplift to his young charges. "Human progress is a foolish myth of epic proportions," Gomes insists. "It is the fantasy...
Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style...
...singer she plays in The Rose has often been compared to Janis Joplin, who died of an overdose of drugs in 1970. Though Midler admires Joplin, the rock singer in the film is, in many respects, Bette Midler. Rose grew up in warm Florida, Bette in balmy Hawaii, and they were both unhappy. In Bette's family, as she remembers, there was always a lot of angry bellowing from her father, a house painter for the Navy. Even today Fred Midler has not come to see one of her shows, a source of obvious pain to his daughter...