Word: sects
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Last week was Moral Re-Armament Week in San Francisco. MRA (or the Oxford Group or Buchmanism) seemed to have found in California its appropriate spiritual home. A hit-&-run sect which had done better at raiding than remaining, MRA and its guiding "Soul Surgeon" Frank Buchman had now been comfortably operating in California for eleven months. Something about its free-&-easy panacea appealed to the West Coast: "It's a world movement designed to build a world free from intolerance, greed, hatred and fear. You don't join anything, you don't pay anything, the idea...
...other religions, heresies and schisms occasionally crop up. Heretics are sometimes exiled, often handed over to the secular arm (shot), always excommunicated. Most serious heresy in the eyes of Stalinist true believers is Trotskyism, whose heresiarch is Leon Trotsky, now an exile in Mexico. Trotsky's heretical sect styles itself the Fourth International (5,000 communicants). Until last week its U. S. congregation was the Socialist Workers Party (membership: 2,000), of which hardbitten James Patrick Cannon and full-lipped Max Schachtman were co-pastors...
...Bradys belong to the Church of God, a hill sect that relies on faith healing rather than medicine. On trial for involuntary manslaughter with Joe Brady went three neighboring hill couples-the Ashley Lunas, Charlie Grays and Lowell McGehees. Prayer had not saved their children; a doctor might have. None of the seven would hire a lawyer. Said Ashley Luna: "Some of us will be jailed, some of us will be penitentiarized, some of us will be beheaded, but the will of God will prevail...
Rabbi Schneersohn is head of a Hasidic sect (150,000 in the U. S.) called the Habad. Hasidism is the faith which Baal Shem Tob, Polish mystic and healer of the 18th Century, offered to downtrodden Jews who had turned away from the dogmatic formalism of their rabbis. The Hasid sang, danced, took joy in his faith, felt himself close to God. At his worst a dreamy, soft-handed, mystical fellow, the Hasid became the butt of many an Eastern European joke. After the time of Baal Shem Tob there arose a Habad ("rational") Hasidism, which urged...
Although His Majesty has had some 150 wives, he belongs to a most ascetic Moslem sect, the Wahabis,and his courtiers explain: "Our King has never had more than four wives at any one time." Bert Fish last week voiced hopes "for the personal happiness of Your Majesty and the prosperity of your people," presented Ibn Saud with a silver-framed photograph of President Roosevelt. Before returning to Cairo, the U. S. Minister will travel narrowly in Saudi Arabia, widely in the Sudan and Upper Egypt...