Word: prayers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week break from prayer meetings on his Down Under "Crusade for Christ," Evangelist Billy Graham went out for a dip in the Pacific surf at Broad-beach, Australia. Later, tanned and rested, he flew off to New Zealand, stirred 3,000 welcomers with a message of hope: "If Christians around the world unite in prayer, we could avert war. We don't have anything in common racially or politically. One common denominator we do have is spiritual...
...Mark (11:20), it was "dried up from the roots." The Rev. Franklin Loehr and his Religious Research Foundation in Los Angeles do not claim such dramatic results, but they are off to a flying start, as reported in a new book (Doubleday; $3.50) titled 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...
...inch, circular cake pan filled with earth was spun, and divided by a piece of lath. On each side of the barrier 23 kernels of corn were planted, and the pan was spun again to select the side to which "positive prayer" should be addressed. For eight days, prayer for growth was given to that side, prayer against growth to the other. Result: "Sixteen sturdy little seedlings greeted us on the positive side. On the negative side there was but one." Against that stubborn seedling the experimenters directed "several brief 'bursts' of negation-strong mental commands to grow...
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...