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Books by Howard Thurman
Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death
(Thurman) /
Jesus and the Disinherited
(Thurman)
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With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman /
For the Inward Journey (Thurman)
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Howard Thurman
By Jean Burden
This month a Negro will mount the pulpit of
Boston University’s Chapel to begin his tenure as dean of the
Chapel, head of a six-member board of preachers, and Professor
of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources in the School of
Theology. He is Dr.
Howard Thurman, grandson of a slave, who organized The Church
for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. He will be
the first of his race to occupy such a position.
Dr. Thurman has been recognized for years as
one of the country’s outstanding preachers, yet this was not
the reason for his appointment by President Harold C. Case.
Boston University announced a new program of religion last
spring: to create an interracial, interdenominational religious
center not only for the campus but for the community as well.
The man responsible for the development of Fellowship Church –
a unique achievement in human relations, being half white and
half non-white – was the natural choice for such an
undertaking.
At Boston University with its 26,795 students
and 16 schools and colleges Dr. Thurman can put into wider
practice the principles that have been proved in Fellowship
Church for the past nine years. Granted an indefinite leave of
absence by his congregation, he will return to San Francisco
each summer to participate in the work of the church. And young
theologians from Boston University will intern at Fellowship
Church, to learn at first hand how to develop churches without
intercultural and interracial barriers.
Howard Thurman is pioneer, mystic, scholar,
poet – all the titles are his. Many people, thinking of his
ideal – the erasing of all barriers between God and man, and
between man and man – have added another: prophet. The
prophets of history have always been champions of the
disinherited; they have always stood for justice in an unjust
society. Whether as angels with the flaming sword, or quietly
like Howard Thurman, they have been the advance guard for the
rest of us. His friends describe him in opposites. One is
conscious of his “bigness”; another calls him
“handsome.” In repose his face is sad. His eyes are large
and expressive, his nose finely sculptured; but it is his long,
thin hands, pale-palmed, that most people remember. They are
never still, gesticulating constantly.
His humor is as famous as his eloquence –
the unself-conscious grin, the rollicking laughter, particularly
at himself, the mischief that always seems to lurk behind his
eyes. His favorite distraction from a grueling schedule is the
detective story, and he travels with a suitcase crammed with the
latest paper-backed editions mingled with leading tomes on
religion and philosophy.
Once he arrived so late at an evensong
service where he was to give the sermon that he tossed his coat
and luggage on a chair in the vestibule and went directly into
the church with the presiding minister. In the middle of the
service he realized that his main quotation was in a book he had
left in the brief case. He returned holding in front of him,
with the distaste he would have shown toward a rattlesnake, a
lurid pocket-sized volume illustrated with a gory corpse. “Dr.
Thurman,” he whispered, “hasn’t there been some
mistake?” Thurman took one peek and dead-pan he replied,
“Not at all, Doctor, you’ve just got the wrong book.”
2
Thurman has come a long way from that small
two-room house in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he was born in
1900. His grandmother, who came to take care of Howard and his
sisters after his father died and his other went to work, had
been born a slave; she could neither read nor write. But it was
Grandmother who insisted on the importance of an education above
all else. By the time Howard reached the eighth grade he was
working in a dry-cleaning shop to help out the family income,
and reciting his lessons to an understanding principal on his
lunch hour. As a result he was the first Negro child in the town
to receive an eighth grade certificate from the public schools.
Grandmother allowed no time for
self-satisfaction. The nearest Negro high school was in
Jacksonsville, and if Howard was going to be there by September
he’d better figure out a way. He figured. A cousin offered to
take him in and give him one meal a day. A friend gave him a
trunk with no tray, handles, or lock. One fall day Howard packed
all his possessions in the trunk, roped it together, and started
for the railroad station with $5 in his pocket.
Grandmother called him back to the steps.
“I want to tell you something, and you remember it all your
life: Look up always; down never. Look forward always; backwards
never. And remember, everything you get you have to work for.”
It looked as though the advice would have to
be put into action almost immediately, for the stationmaster
could see no way to ship the trunk when there was nothing to
attach the tag to but rope, and that was against the law. To
send it by express—his only alternative—was a financial
impossibility. Howard burst into tears. An old man in blue
denims and bandana was sitting on the steps, watching with
interest. He ambled over. “If you are trying to get out of
this Godforsaken place to get an education, and the only thing
that stands in your way is money for that trunk, I’ll pay the
express.” He took out a rawhide money bag, counted out $3, and
Howard was on his way.
School was always wonderful. He worked hard
and his grades were the best. “It was the only asset I had—I
looked terrible!” He learned Latin with the enthusiasm most
boys apply to marbles or baseball. He studied Shakespeare and
the librettos of all the operas, and memorized reams of poetry.
On summer vacations he worked in a bookstore or shined shoes or
janitored.
By the time he went to Morehouse College in
Georgia he wanted to go into religion. “When I was born, God
must have put a live coal in my heart, for I was His man and
there was no escape.” At the beginning of his junior year he
decided he needed to know some philosophy. The college offered
nothing but logic and ethics. The only way he could manage it
was to win all the cash prizes at Commencement and thereby earn
enough money to go to Columbia in the summer. This he did. He
lived with a friend in a small rented room in Harlem on 55 cents
a day, reading Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel. And for the first
time in his life he studied with white boys. “It was here,”
Thurman recalls, “that I made the precious discovery that a
brain is a brain, and the package doesn’t matter."
At his graduation from Morehouse he applied
for admission to Andover Theological Seminary, but religion was
only for Caucasians, and they turned him down. He then made
application at Colgate-Rochester. They were a little
better—they had a Negro quota. (Both restrictions have since
been removed.) They also had a scholarship for him. He had to
read fast that first year to catch up with the boys from large
Eastern colleges. There were books that he read in the ten
minutes between classes; others that he saved for riding across
town on the streetcar; books that he read in the bathroom. He
kept half a dozen going all the time. He kept notes of every
reference that the professors made and went back to the library
to look them up.
He was the only Negro in his class, and he
graduated at the top of it. There were at least two men at
Colgate-Rochester who had tremendous influences on Howard
Thurman’s thinking. One was Dr. Henry Robins who taught the
Philosophy and History of Religion. “It was he who first
defined for me the scent that had been in my nostrils a long
time: that the spiritual experience of the human race was
essentially one single experience.”
The other was Dr. George Cross, Professor of
Systematic Theology. “He had a greater influence on my mind
than any other who ever lived. Everything about me was alive
when I came into his presence. He was all stimulus and I was all
response.” He called Howard into his office as he was about to
graduate, and asked him about his plans for the future. Howard
told him he had a small parish in Oberlin, Ohio, and was going
to take graduate work on the side.
Dr. Cross approved. “Howard Thurman, you
have the capacity to become one of the great original creative
thinkers; to influence the religious thought of our nation,
perhaps of the whole world—if you aren’t tampered with!
Because you are a Negro you may be tricked into using all your
valuable creativity in fighting the race question. The race
question is a social question and all social questions are
temporary. Suppose Jesus had used all his energies in fighting
the Roman Empire? Address your mind to the timeless questions of
the human spirit! You have that kind of mind.”
One more man was to shape Howard Thurman’s
development. At a religious conference he saw a small book on a
secondhand table. He bought it for 10 cents and sat down on the
steps outside to read it. When he got up he knew he had found
the person to lead him further—Dr. Rufus Jones, the great
Quaker, then teaching at Haverford College. Thurman wrote,
asking if he could come and study privately with him. Jones
accepted him immediately, and for the next year Thurman sat at
his feet, experiencing his first formal
introduction to the history and study of mysticism. When he left
he was under appointment to Morehouse and Spelman Colleges in
Atlanta, where he taught Philosophy of Religion until 1932; then
he was called to Howard University in Washington, D.C., to be
Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Systematic Theology.
3
The idea of an interracial church first came
to Howard Thurman in 1935 on the other side of the
world—Khyber Pass. On leave of absence from Howard University,
he had been sent with his wife, the former Sue Bailey, as
chairman of the Pilgrimage of Friendship to students of India,
Burma, and Ceylon under the auspices of the World Student
Christian Federation. He had spoken in 45 centers and covered
18,000 miles. “The trip caught up with us at Khyber Pass,”
he remembers, “ and it was here that we weighed and sorted it
out.”
Outstanding in their reflection was their
audience with Gandhi in Bardoli, arranged at the latter’s
invitation. “The representatives of these two great peoples
must get together,” said Gandhi. “If you cannot come to me,
I will take the train with my doctor and come to you.”
After breakfasting in a mango grove at dawn
with Gandhi’s secretary, they drove in a model T Ford to his
headquarters a few miles away. The National Party flag was
fluttering from the ridgepole as the car pulled up to the dusty
clearing in front of the tent, and, breaking all precedent,
Gandhi himself came out and walked over to them in greeting.
Following him into the tent, they sat on the floor, while Gandhi
took out his silver watch and laid it in front of him. “We
have three hours to talk; let us not waste a moment.”
Before the end Sue Thurman asked him, “Will
you come to America and be the guest of the American Negro?”
“That is the only way I could come, but not
unless I have some creative and healing thing to say to the
people. Until I have found an answer to our own problem in
India. I have no right to come to America and say anything.”
Then Howard Thurman asked, “What is the
greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in India?”
“Christianity,” Gandhi replied.
So, as they rested on the mountaintop, they
asked themselves if they could remain in a tradition that not
only permitted but fostered rules of separateness. There was no
glossing over the question. They knew the picture only too well.
They knew that of the 8 million Protestant Negroes in the United
States less than one tenth of one percent could worship in
“white” churches. And these were usually churches in such
small communities that it was unsound to establish a separate
church for the few Negro members. The result was that in the one
place where the teachings of Jesus could be immediately put into
action in the normal fellowship of neighbor loving neighbor, and
where the relationship of a human being with God should take
precedence over his condition of race, status, and class –
here these lines of distinction were guaranteed.
At Khyber Pass, Howard Thurman decided to
stay in the Christian tradition and to make it live for the weak
as well as the strong – for all peoples, whatever their color,
whatever their caste. He would try to atone for the slave
traffickers who called themselves Christians, for the man who
wrote “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds” and made his
money selling black serfs to the “Christians” of the New
World, for the nameless Englishman who called his slave vessel Jesus
– and for all the ones who came after.
During the post-India years the idea of a
church that would cross all lines, the genius of which would be
a religious fellowship, not another settlement house, nagged at
Howard Thurman’s mind. He knew the interracial idea could be
successful for a limited period in a highly controlled situation,
such as YMCA conferences, but could it be done in an
uncontrolled situation over an unlimited period of time?
To find out the answer, he knew he would have
to set down roots somewhere in a community and work at the
generating of fellowship seven days a week within the context of
a religious institution. Should it be tried in New York City? In
Washington, D.C.? In either case it meant taking time out from
his assignment at the university to become established in the
community, and he didn’t have that sort of opportunity. He
would have to watch and pray for a place where there was a
nucleus from which he could move forward.
The nucleus was already forming – not in
New York, not in Washington, but 3000 miles away in a congested
street in San Francisco. It was 1943. The Japanese had been
forcibly moved out; the Negroes had moved in. Faced with a
highly volatile social situation, Dr. Alfred Fisk, Professor of
Philosophy at San Francisco State College, and a Presbyterian
clergyman deeply concerned with the problem of reconciliation in
this city of forty-eight different ethnic groups, decided
something should be done about it.
Backed by funds from his church, he gathered
around him a handful of people who believed as he did, and
together they formed a “Neighborhood Church.” From the
beginning it cut across all racial lines. Also, interestingly
enough, it immediately attracted people from a variety of
denominations, principally Quakers and Episcopalians. About
thirty men and women met weekly in the living room of an old
house on Post Street, recently converted to a chapel. The church
had no formal membership but a surprising amount of enthusiasm.
In the fall of 1943 an important letter was
sent by Dr. Fisk to A.J. Muste, secretary of the fellowship of
reconciliation in New York. It asked if Mr. Muste knew of some
young Negro Divinity School graduate who would like to come out
to San Francisco to share in the development of this idea. Muste
knew of none, but forwarded the latter to his friend Dr.
Thurman, who, in his key position at Howard University, might
very likely know of just the right man. In such casual ways does
Fate pull problem and answer together.
In a postscript to a letter to Fisk,
expressing regret that a young friend whom he had recommended
had not found it possible to accept the job, Thurman wrote,
“If I could wangle a leave of absence, I’d like to come
myself.”
Fisk’s immediate reply was excited and
incredulous. Would he really consider the job? It paid only $200
a month and Howard Thurman had a family to support.
There were four men at Howard University that
President Mordecai Johnson must have known he could not keep.
One was in Political Science; one in Law; a third was in Music;
and the fourth in Religion: Ralph Bunche, William Hastie, Todd
Duncan, and Howard Thurman. “This isn’t your year for a
sabbatical, Thurman,” President Johnson warned when surprised
of the plan. “You may have a leave of absence but you’ll
have to take it on the cuff.”
Thurman replied in “pious” words, but
with an impious twinkle in his eye, “God will take care of
me.”
4
It was a small group he found waiting but
their mission was huge. What they lacked in numbers and in
money, they had to make up for in zeal. One of the first things
they must decide was what, precisely, they were. It was much easier to see what they were not. Not Baptist,
Methodist, nor Congregational. Nor anything, in fact, that had
ever been conceived before. “It was my idea,” explains
Thurman, "to project a church that would have a growing and
creative basis of membership, rather than beginning from within
the presupposition of a particular denomination.”
Another major problem was the church building
itself. From the very beginning Thurman urged the small
congregation to move from the Fillmore Post area. “If we
don’t move, we will become a Negro church, segregated in spite
of ourselves.” Many of the members were loath to leave,
feeling that such a move would only be interpreted as an
abandonment of the people. Thurman stuck to his guns, and
finally won, as much on the obvious need for larger quarters as
on his original argument. The new building was only slightly
better than the first, being the Filipino Methodist Church on
Pine. The Thurmans stayed on in their living quarters on Port
street, sharing them now with the Japanese minister, his wife,
and many of their friends who had returned. “It was an old
house, where there were not only dirt and congestion but
rats,” recalls the Thurmans.
Howard and Sue Thurman could stand anything
for a limited length of time, but when they saw the growing
bewilderment on the faces of their daughters, Olive and Anne,
they knew they would have to move or risk having them turn
against the whole conception.. Thurman’s leave had been
extended another year. He could send his family back to
Washington or buy a house in San Francisco and cut his ties with
Howard University. It was a big decision, but about the time
Fellowship Church moved for the second time, to the Theatre Arts
Colony, the Thurmans found a house big enough not only for
themselves but for all the group meetings of the church as well.
They decided to stay. Olive saw it before she entered Vassar
that fall on a three-year scholarship, and young Anne at last
had a place to bring her friends to.
The financial support they received from the
Presbyterian Church was another problem, welcome as it was in
many ways. If they continued to accept it, they were in great
danger of becoming a Presbyterian Mission Church. On the other
hand, to throw away the $3600 a year looked like an easy way to
commit suicide. How would they manage, adrift?
Characteristically, the little group stuck out its collective
chin and voted to become independent. The great faith this
displayed was matched by Thurman’s own.
When, in the next few years, the budget was
stretched to the danger point—and it was, much more often than
it was not—he would accept an itinerary of speaking
engagements throughout the East, making one-night stands at
churches and colleges, and bringing back enough money to carry
them over the next hump. His working schedule began at dawn and
continued into the night, seven days a week. “It was not only
driving uphill,” he remembers, “it was cutting the road out
as we went without benefit of map.” Preaching, counseling,
juggling, meeting with civic leaders, mothering and fathering
his flock. Raising money was only part of it.
In 1949 the church again decided to do the
impossible. They would buy their own building on Larkin at
Vallejo. It would cost $40,000. A glance at the operating budget
showed a deficit of exactly $1060, but by this time the 200
members of fellowship Church were confident they had a guardian
angel. Furthermore, to enumerate the resident membership (close
to 400 today) is to tell only part of the story. There was
another much larger group, slightly amorphous in structure,
called members-at-large. These were persons living all over the
United States and as far away as Formosa, India, Japan, South
Africa, Iran, and England, who retained their own denominational
ties but who contributed to the financial support of the church
because they believed so strongly in its cause. These crusaders
(about 1200 to date, and numbering among them many persons of
prominence) continue to shoulder a portion of the operating
budget and a major part of the building debt.
The $40,000 was borrowed from a private
endowment fund without interest, the principal to be paid back
in the unbelievably short span of three years. Howard Thurman
and Gene Walker, then chairman of the board of Fellowship
Church, and a producer of industrial motion pictures, initiated
the amazing solicitation that followed. Across the country in
Philadelphia an insurance executive, Arthur U. Crosby, headed a
group called “Friends of Fellowship Church,” formed for the
sole purpose of raising funds. Dr. Channing Tobias and friends
of Fellowship Church gave a dinner for Dr. Thurman in New York
and succeeded in adding several thousand dollars to the coffers.
These men, aided and abetted by nameless hundreds, performed the
incredible. They raised the $40,000 in the allotted time, and
all but $2500 of it came from friends and members-at-large,
local and national.
Promptly on payment of this indebtedness the
board took on another, the purchase of the building next door,
to be used for the myriad activities that are so important a
part of the church’s life. The new Fellowship Hall is a busy
place. Here the choir, as polyglot as the church itself,
practices weekly. Launched with a generous gift from Todd
Duncan, its fusion of voices brings to each Sunday service music
of high distinction. In other corners are the Liturgical Dance
Choir; the Intercultural Workshop; Sunday Fellowship with lunch
following the morning service; the English Hand Bell
Ringers; and the Drama group. Mental health Institutes are held twice a year, the
Religious Arts Festival every
June, and the Social Service Committee functions all the time.
One woman remarked, “I used to be a golf widow; now I’m a
church widow!”
The forum and lectures are organized by Mrs.
Thurman. Sometimes there is a talk by a Negro scholar from
Liberia; at other times an exhibit of wood-forms by an American
artist, a concert by an Armenian on the Egyptian harp, or a
program of Jewish folklore.
The Children’s Workshop in International
Living is held every summer as another dimension of the Church
School. Here the work goes on at a different level. One year it
was a study of the American Indian, with two young Navajo girls
coming all the way from New Mexico and living with Fellowship
families during their stay. Other years the Workshop studied
Africa, India, and Japan.
5
In his capacity as pastor, Dr. Thurman
experienced countless personal indignities; the times he was
refuted service in restaurants, the parish calls in apartment
buildings when he was asked to use the freight elevator –
these were part of the early history. Curiously enough, the
church itself has never been criticized for its interracial
platform. Most Christians pay lip service to such an ideal, even
if they don’t care to put it into practice. But the logical
conclusions thereof, the points at which such a commitment meets
the environment outside of the church – these have been under
attack.
The unique criticism has been that the church
is too highbrow! Although Dr. Thurman claims he is no scholar,
it is a safe bet that anyone else would claim it for him. His
sermons puzzle some people. One of the oldest members of his San
Francisco congregation took him aside one day and pleaded,
“Doctor, I don’t want to change anything, buy don’t you
know any little words?”
Listeners are always surprised that from this
man comes no social protest in the ordinary sense. He preaches
no sermons on the racial problem, on politics, or on bigotry. He
attacks the mainspring of social ills, not the results as such.
Being a mystic in the most practical down-to-earth sense, who
lives in the world, not apart from it, Thurman has always
preached on man’s encounter with a spiritual reality.
Sometimes his preaching takes the form of a series of sermons,
like his famous ones on Prayer.
His sermons are always basic; they deal with
the eternal verities. That such lessons lived would result in
world order and peace at all levels is obvious. But first things
come first. There have been a few people who see things
differently, who have tried to pressure him into endorsing their
own political beliefs. One woman walked out on one of his
sermons because she felt he wasn’t meeting the social issue
squarely. But Howard Thurman knows what he is doing. He will
never be a whip for any cause. His voice is powerful,
compelling. He will not exhort, cajole, or pound the lectern. He
will turn men to the inner Light if they will let him.
It is a radical thing to preach the kind of
truth that is found acceptable to the Jew (there have been
several in his congregations), to the Roman Catholic (one boy in
the Fellowship choir attended Mass every Sunday morning before
coming to the eleven o’clock service), to the Japanese
Buddhist, the Hindu, the Quaker, and to the fugitives from all
organized religion. There are two reactions to Fellowship Church
that members wait to hear from newcomers. One is: “This is the
church I have been looking for all my life!” And the other is:
“And I’m not really religious!” Thurman defines a creed as
“a bronze plaque erected at the site of a battle, signifying
who won,” and dogma as “the rationalization of somebody
“else’s personal religious experience.” And in so teaching
his basic theme is reiterated: We are one at any level.
Everyone asks, of course, how the commitment
of Fellowship Church has been expressed in the daily lives of
those who profess it. It is one thing to practice brotherhood on
Sunday morning, but what about Monday and Tuesday? What about
the areas of human relations commonly unillumined by religious
attitudes? The answer can be supplied by many members of the San
Francisco congregation.
It is commonplace in this fellowship that
members of one race mingle socially with members of another.
They meet in each other’s homes, picnic with each other, go to
concerts together, dine in public places. In the beginning this
was often done awkwardly if with the best of intentions, and it
was there that Dr. Thurman’s patience was seen at its most
tactful. “He met us where we were, and treated us as though we
were where we ought to have been. How we blush now when we
remember that we played him Marion Anderson records on his first
evening in our home, and talked racial problems until he must
have squirmed!”
By now they have reached a point where action
is implemented not only by Fellowship Church as an institution,
but by their faith that this brotherhood is a part of the
future.
A man and his wife, members of Fellowship
Church, against neighborhood threats of violence, rented their
spare room to a Negro. In a remarkably short time the excitement
subsided and the newcomer was accepted without fuss. The same
story was repeated when another member rented her guest cottage
to a Negro social worker who became the most popular resident of
an all-white neighborhood.
In Tucson the Superintendent of Public
Schools, Robert D. Morrow, a member-at-large, spearheaded the
desegregation of schools in that town. The Dean of Women of a
large Southern university allowed Negroes to mix with whites at
one of Dr, Thurman’s lectures – an unheard-of gesture. In
India a member-at-large studied famine relief among the very
poor of another colored race, and enlisted the help of
Fellowship Church. Members gave up one meal a week, contributing
its cost to the fund.
A prominent Negro in industrial relations
confessed that before he became a member of Fellowship Church he
suspected everybody that had a white face. Sensitized by Howard
Thurman’s message, he decided to see if he could make a friend
of the white man who had opposed him on every committee. He did
so, and relations, human as well as industrial, took a step in a
new direction.
“Dr. T’s” decision to go on to Boston
was a crisis that took months to meet. Now, under the interim
leadership of Dr. Dryden Phelps and for thirty years Professor
and Dean of the Chapel at China Union University, a resurgence
of vitality is proving that the cause of fellowship is bigger
even than devotion to Dr. Thurman. Dr. Phelps put it another
way:--
“Actually, the enduring quality to be
tested: whether the Idea which he and this church have shared
these years can now take on a kind of independent life of its
own among us: send roots even deeper, expand wider, grow
upwards. But we also are about to be tested as to the measure of
our own continuing loyalty to the Idea, and our creative
on-going capacity to make it live in our lives, and in other
lives, and in this religious community. I believe God is
watching, and not a few other churches.”
Howard Thurman knows he is only a small part
of a single creative movement. Racial unity is only part of it.
Never does he forget the total issue. What he said at the
mortgage-burning ceremony is as pertinent in his new position:
“Man builds his little shelter, he raises
his little wall, builds his little altar, worships his little
God, organizes the resources of his little life to defend his
little barrier, and he can’t do it! What we are committed to
here, and what many other people in other places are committed
to, is very simple – that it is possible to develop a
religious fellowship that it is creative in character, so
convincing in quality that it inspires the mind to multiply
experiences of unity – which experiences of unity become over
and over and over again more compelling than the concepts, the
ways of life, the sects and the creeds that separate men. We
believe that in the presence of God with His dream of order
there is neither male nor female, white nor black, Gentile nor
Jew, Protestant nor Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, nor Moslem, but a
human spirit stripped to the literal substance of itself.
“Wherever man has the scent of the eternal
unity in his spirit, he hunts for it in his home, in his work,
among his friends, in his pleasures and in all the levels of his
function. It is my simple faith that this is the kind of
universe that sustains that kind of adventure. And what we are
fumbling towards now . . . tomorrow will be the way of life for
everybody!” Source: The Atlantic Monthly (1953)
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updated 30 September 2007 |