Word: buchman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During recent years. Pennsylvania-born Frank Buchman lived part of the time in a luxurious Shangri-La at Caux, Switzerland, where two former hotels and a cluster of chalets, overlooking the French Alps and Lake Geneva, had become M.R.A.'s international headquarters. Last week, having lately finished a strenuous session with 850 Moral Re-Armers from all over, he was vacationing at the Black Forest resort town of Freudenstadt. There, one night Frank Buchman suffered a heart attack and died...
...Oxford Group. Frank Buchman's special magnetism was not evident early in his life; one of his teachers in his home town of Pennsburg. Pa., remembered him as "not outstanding in any respect." A bachelor all his life, he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1902, and soon found that his special interest was working with young men; for seven years he was secretary of the Y.M.C.A. at Pennsylvania State College. After that, missionary work and evangelism among prisoners in World War I took him to the Near and Far East. and to Europe. It was not until...
...America, the Oxford Group went well for a time among Ivy League undergraduates, who responded to the shiny-eyed intensity of the group's weekend "house parties" in well-staffed mansions, with their morning "quiet times" and their public confessions of sins. The four tenets of Frank Buchman's version of Oxford Group Christianity were "absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love," and so much absolutism was bound occasionally to end in tears; at Princeton, for instance, President John Hibben summarily banned Frank Buchman from the campus...
...Guided Elite. Buchman meant M.R.A. to be a "God-guided campaign to prevent war by moral and spiritual awakening." It failed to prevent war, and it earned considerable censure for seeming to rely heavily on "changing" dictators; Buchman had the misfortune to exclaim publicly: "I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler." After World War II, M.R.A. turned to attacking Communism...
Such attacks did not keep M.R.A. from prospering. For a U.S. headquarters, it built a multimillion-dollar establishment on Michigan's Mackinac Island, with room for 1,000 visitors. And from Caux to London's Berkeley Square to New York's Westchester County layouts, Buchman and his followers have always had nothing but the best. This luxury, too, brought criticism, but Frank Buchman had an answer. "Isn't God a millionaire?" he would...