Word: preacher
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...journalism often appears to be biased reporting. But Griffith believes that bias is less prevalent than it used to be, at least among "straight" newsmen (as opposed to the underground press and New Journalists who "live at the intersection of fact and fiction"). In any event, Griffith is no preacher of bland impartiality. He argues that newsmen should have a sense of commitment and responsibility, provided that their general convictions do not cloud their judgment in handling specific stories. He urges readers to "suspect an indifference that calls itself impartiality; it is the pedestrian asset of secondrraters...
...first and last lines. There's a pimp called Baboon who operates out of a Chinese flophouse and acts like a henchman for a Malay lumber dealer who tries to bribe a librarian to say the book he wants to borrow is a good one. A Salvation Army preacher (name unknown) whose skin is so thick "it bends anything you stick into it" lets a man spit in his face as a condition to a donation, and later shoots himself, uttering somebody else's last words. These people have the poetic, imaginative quality of other Brecht characters, but the fantasy...
Gomes enjoyed it enough to attend two churches--one in the morning among whites and the other in the evening with Plymouth's tiny black community. Still, suggestions that he become a preacher unnerved him. "I loved to talk and I liked the church," he says. "It was the ministers I didn't like. Either they were too arbitrary, or too cold, or they were just too fuddy-duddyish." Determined to escape the confines of organized religion, he left Plymouth for Bates College to study another love, history, and "let nature take its course...
Harvard does not insult the devout as much as it assaults religion itself, and Gomes takes "the life of the mind" seriously. But by his own definition, a good preacher "is not apologetic about his role as a Christian in what is easily called a post-Christian age." Harvard offers an additional insidious pitfall: "You must deal with power," Gomes says. "Harvard is full of powerful people, but you must not be seduced or corrupted by power. You walk a very tight rope...
Though Gomes attributes his success to the changing times, many of the new Memorial Church regulars oppose the Stendahl report only because of Gomes himself--they want Harvard to appoint him the official minister. They seem to be part of congregation attracted to a church more by the preacher than the God inside...