Word: suburbanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...grey flannel suit who has long fumed at these attacks, behind his paper on the 7:28 from Bound Brook, N.J., is Personnel Manager George S. Odiorne of Manhattan's American Management Association. In the current issue of Presbyterian Life he rises to the defense of suburban Christianity...
Skewering the Bourgeois. Suburbanite Odiorne runs through the standard attitudes of the suburban churchgoer's critics-the "genteel disdain" for the quality of his faith, the "elegant reservations" as to the value of his energetic pursuit of bazaars, suppers, plays, baseball teams, bowling leagues, discussion groups. For these critics, says Odiorne: "The Johnny-come-lately, making up the pulpy mass of this return to religion it seems, has several basic flaws which make him offensive to the intellectual bourbons of the cloth," i.e., his preoccupation with getting ahead in the world, conforming to his neighbors and raising his children...
...While this skewering of the bourgeois comprises excellent sport for the staff thinker at national headquarters or at the seminary, it leaves a few important things unsaid." For one thing, the church gains in suburbia have not all been in numbers and money. "Within the suburban church there are more people listening attentively to the preaching of the Word who are taking part in administering the sacraments of the church, who are moving steadily toward lives of Christian devotion, and who are carrying the mission of the church through education and missionary endeavor...
Also on the plus side, Odiorne rates suburban indifference to sects and even the suburban tendency to conformity, which he finds is modeled on "the proper mixture of doctrinal emphasis on the Bible, the Lordship of Christ, witness in life and by word...
...last week dipped farther into the $198 million capital reserve long hoarded by penny-pinching former Chairman Sewell Avery. To put Ward on Chicago's State Street, the city's retail center, Barr announced purchase of the Fair, an 82-year-old department store with three thriving suburban branches, controlled by Five & Ten Mogul Sebastian S. Kresge's charitable Kresge Foundation. For $7,532,500, Ward bought 301,300 shares of the Fair stock from the foundation at $25 a share, will try to buy the remaining 70,800 shares from 1,500 private owners...