Word: melton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...festival, organized by a group called the Midwest Pagan Council, reflected what some religious leaders find to have been a rather rapid spread of neopaganism around the country over the past decade. J. Gordon Melton, an Evanston, Ill., Methodist minister who heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion, reckons that there may be as many as 40,000 practicing pagans today. They constitute, says Melton, "a neopaganist movement, a modern revival of the rituals and faith by people who were not raised in them...
...standard Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches lists only 296 denominations. Lutheran Theologian Arthur C. Piepkorn tracked down 735 North American groups for his Profiles in Belief (Harper & Row is up to Volume IV of this posthumous seven-volume work). Now comes J. Gordon Melton's encyclopedia listing 1,187 "primary" denominations in the U.S., which makes him America's champion church hunter...
...Melton, 36, has pursued his hobby of spiritual taxonomy for 15 years. He is now a Methodist pastor in Evanston, Ill., and his rambling parsonage houses the Institute for the Study of American Religion. Melton has conducted hundreds of field interviews. During one foray to the offices of the animal-loving Church of All Worlds, his wife Dorothea went into a bathroom only to confront a live boa constrictor curled in the corner and a 4-ft. crocodile...
...Encyclopedia takes a rigorously objective approach, offering no judgments of creed. The work is a unique reference owing to Melton's new material on what he calls the nation's "hidden religions," groups which lie outside the mainstream and are barely visible to outsiders: spiritualists, religious psychics, occultists and assorted "New Age" sects. Melton is convinced that America is as spiritual as it ever was, but that more people are becoming attached to the obscure faiths. Says Melton: "We are probably the most religious people-and the most diversely religious people-on earth...
...Dave Kingman 41)Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose and Reggie Smith 42)Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith and Dusty Baker of the Los Angeles Dodgers 43)Don Drysdale 44)Jerry Reuss 45)Warren Spahn 46)Mike Corkins 47)Frank Robinson 48)Jack Fisher 49)Willie Kirkland 50)Cliff Melton 51)Mace Brown...