Word: alberts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...instinctive respect for all living creatures seemed strange to his schoolmates, and often it made him sad. ("Youth's unqualified joie de vivre" he once wrote, "I never really knew.") Twice Albert went fishing, but "the treatment of the worms . . . and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes" were too much for him. Each night, after his prayers with his mother, he added a secret one of his own: "O Heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath, guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace...
...young Albert, music was sometimes a shattering experience. He once heard a group of older schoolboys practicing their singing lesson; the unexpected thrill of hearing two-part harmony, he wrote later, forced him to steady himself against the wall to keep from falling. When he first heard brass instruments played together, he says, "I almost fainted from excess of pleasure...
...eight, Albert foreshadowed the direction of his future biblical criticism when he asked, on reading the story of the Three Wise Men, how the parents of Jesus could have been poor after receiving the gold and costly gifts the Magi brought. "And that the Wise Men should never have troubled themselves again about the Child Jesus was to me incomprehensible. The absence, too, of any record of the shepherds of Bethlehem becoming disciples gave me a severe shock...
Preaching Was Necessary. For an idealist of 21, there was nothing particularly unusual about his decision except that he acted upon it. For Albert Schweitzer, the resolution was a binding contract with himself. Without telling anyone of his decision, he set out upon such a decade of activity as would have done credit to an ordinary man's lifetime...
Will-to-Love. Is Albert Schweitzer a Christian? He is certainly not an orthodox one. He subscribes to no creed and has no patience with theological distinctions. His religious thinking and living have character that defies any precise labeling. He is a pantheist, but he is far more than a pantheist. "Every form of living Christianity," he says, "is pantheistic in that it is bound to envisage everything that exists as having its being in the great First Cause of all being." But to him, ethical piety cannot depend upon the impersonal First Cause manifested in nature but upon...