Word: hymnals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Verses from a Republican hymnal? No, just a few of the burns inflicted by Democrats on one another last week at a dinner sponsored by Independent Action, a liberal political-action committee. The original idea was engagingly ironic. The seven Democratic presidential candidates would feast on the foibles of New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, the popular recalcitrant whose internal clock says 1988 is not his time. The Seven Dwarfs take on the big guy. But the celebrity roast became a multilateral immolation, as if each candidate wanted to keep his rivals short...
...Congress and those states that ratified the Bill of Rights intended merely to prevent the establishment of a single national religion and keep the Federal Government from interfering with the established churches in various states. Accommodationists delight in noting that Jefferson allowed the Bible and a hymnal to be used to teach reading when he headed the District of Columbia school board, and that he signed a treaty in which the U.S. Government paid a Catholic missionary's salary and built churches for Indians. James Madison, who drafted the religion clauses of the Bill of Rights, issued prayer proclamations when...
...July 4 weekend, along with the verses of another warhorse, the Battle Hymn of the Republic ("Mine eyes have seen the glory . . ."). But at least one group of church officials has deemed these traditional words unfit for use in worship. Earlier this year a committee preparing a new hymnal for the United Methodist Church voted to delete the lines from the volume. Native Americans, they feared, might take offense at a verse extolling the white man's exploits in the wilderness. And the Battle Hymn, they contended, is too militaristic to fit the church's current pacifist stance. Banished...
...truncated America the Beautiful might be tolerable, but Methodists have risen up in wrath over censorship of the Battle Hymn and especially the beloved Onward. In recent weeks the hymnal committee's Nashville office has been besieged with 9,000 letters of protest. Chastened, the panel held an emergency meeting last week and reversed itself, though the unrepentant Rev. Beryl Ingram-Ward of Bellevue, Wash., still argued against the notion of "the warrior Christ...
...harried committee, facing a 1988 deadline, hopes to produce a revised hymnal that will offend no interest group among the liberal denomination's 9.2 million members. High on the agenda is eliminating any language that might be deemed sexist--not least because by the end of the century a projected 40% of Methodist clergy will be women. Thus God of Our Fathers is to become God of the Ages, and out go Harry Emerson Fosdick's rousing lines: "Grant us wisdom, Grant us courage,/ That we fail not man nor thee." In some cases, traditional texts have been retained...