"Pretty girl's pictures help sell toothpaste, cigarettes and magazines, so why shouldn't they help sell religion? This logic is being applied by churchmen producing the new TV series called, This is the Life."
"After all - it's no sin to be pretty" - quoth Reverend R.C. Wuerffel, Chairman of the Lutheran TV Production Committee.
It was indeed divine inspiration that graced the craniums of these producing-churchmen employed by the Lutheran Hour Ministries - this television program was an absolute success - appearing first in 1952 and wrapping in 1988. Some of the pretty faces they employed along the way belonged to Annette O'Toole, Kathy Garver, Angie Dickinson, Lisa Pelikan, Mala Powers and Lynn Whitfield.
Watch Jack Nicholson in an episode of "This Is The Life". Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 - 1969) got some attention in the press when he preached that the work of saving of souls had much to do with man's maintenance of a sound and just economic system here on the earth. Dr. Fosdick gained much of this understanding in the slums of New York City, in 1903, where he worked as a Baptist Minister. "In the twentieth century the greatest conflict in the world's life is centered in economics. The most vital questions with which we deal are entangled with economic motives and institutions." Click here to read further about Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick.. Attached is an article filed during the closing days of the Greco-Turkish War (1919 - 1922) which takes into account that seven years after the 1915 Armenian slaughter in Asia Minor, the victorious governments of the West had never dolled out any punitive measures whatever, and the murder of Christians was continuing under cover of the Greek military withdrawal from that region. "...the Christian population is flying, like herds of frightened sheep, and the fate of those who lag behind is death." Seeing that much of the momentum to prohibit the national sale, distribution and consumption of wine and spirits originated with a hardy chunk of the observant Christian community, the Reverend John Cole McKim decided to weigh in on the topic. McKim tended to believe that: "Christ, being divine and consequently infallible, could not have erred. Since it is well known that Christ used wine Himself and gave it to others..." He further opined: "But to vote what one regards as a natural right shall be declared forever illegal, is cowardly, un-American, and un-Christian."
Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era
Chances are pretty slim that Jesus of Nazareth was a button-nose blondy - so pink of cheek, with eyes of blue - yet, time and again, this was the manner in which he was rendered by the Christians of the Gilded Age. When the African-American magazine The Crises began to run illustrated advertisements depicting Christ as anything but a white fellow you better believe there were some letters addressed to their editors on the issue. The attached article was their response to these outraged readers. The author reported that in the year 1912 one could easily find a plethora of "useless" and needless faiths and denominations: "These religions come to naught in the end."
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