Word: loehr
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...experiment was conceived at the beginning of the term in order to test the claims of Reverend Franklin W. Loehr of Los Angeles, whose book, The Power of Prayer on Plants, has enjoyed popular success among not-too-green-thumbed housewives...
...well as some of the most enervating and profitable books known to publishing, purveys non-religion in endless series of similarly named volumes, all of them containing at least one poem by Joyce Kilmer. This curious subindustry reached its perihelion a couple of years ago with Presbyterian Minister Franklin Loehr's The Power of Prayer on Plants...
Presbyterian Loehr, 45, was trained as a chemist at Illinois' Monmouth College before he turned to the ministry and "religious research." When he heard six years ago that Duke University's famed extrasensory perceptionist, Dr. Joseph B. Rhine, was testing the effect of prayer on plants, Loehr and his associates bought two sealed jars of water, prayed hard over one, ignored the other, and used them to water two equal sets of seeds, planted under identical conditions. Two weeks later the prayed-over water had produced seven seedlings, the ordinary water only three. "It looked as though...
Like Dr. Rhine in his work on extrasensory perception, Researcher Loehr found that some people are better at it than others. One woman scored slightly lower than average in praying her seedlings up, but when she tried "negative prayer," the seedlings showed hardly any life at all. "She was rather shaken by the experience," writes Loehr, "but I am keeping her name and address on file. The time may come when those with effective prayer-negation power will be sought again for their healing help." How does one go about praying negatively? One experimenter resorted to calling her seedlings Communists...
After more than 700 experiments conducted by about 150 people on 27,000-odd seeds and seedlings, concludes Experimenter Loehr, "our research has shown . . . that prayer can make a difference in the speed of seed germination and in the rate and vigor of plant growth. This in turn demonstrates two things: 1) that prayer is fact, and 2) that scientific laboratory research can be done in basic religious fields...