Bearing witness: ‘Remember who you are and whom you serve,’ Christianity Today has reminded us

Bear witness.

“Remember who you are and whom you serve,” as Christianity Today has just reminded us.

Jeanette  gave me a subscription to Christianity Today for Christmas this year. While I always try and find my way into Hull’s Family Bookstores when we’re in Winnipeg, where I buy the most recent issue available, my trips to the provincial capital are only occasional, and I have not previously been a subscriber to the magazine, although I have been reading free content online over the years.

This month, I can’t think of any publication more deserving of monetary support.

Kudos to Timothy Dalrymple, president and CEO of Christianity Today, and Mark Galli, outgoing editor in chief of Christianity Today. Since 1956 and its founding by the late Billy Graham, Christianity Today has been a trusted beacon. Part of its “Statement of Faith” proclaims, “When we have turned to God in penitent faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are accountable to God for living a life separated from sin and characterized by the fruit of the Spirit. It is our responsibility to contribute by word and deed to the universal spread of the Gospel.”

Nearly 200 evangelical leaders, however, are pushing back against Galli’s recent editorial that called for United States President Donald Trump to be removed from office, saying the piece “offensively” dismissed their support of the president.

Following Trump’s impeachment last week, Galli called Trump a “grossly immoral character.” The criticism was notable as evangelicals are a key constituency of Trump.

On Dec. 22, a number of prominent evangelical leaders affirmed their strong support of the president and slammed the magazine in a letter to Dalrymple: “Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations,” the evangelical leaders wrote. “It not only targeted our President; it also targeted those of us who support him, and have supported you,” they added.

The signatories include Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty College; Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Ralph Reed, the president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition; and Paula White Cain, Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser who recently joined the White House staff.

Former Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and former United States House of Representatives Republicans Michele Bachmann and Bob McEwen were also among those who signed the letter.

All that said, it would be a mistake simply to reduce this to a matter of caricature of those we disagree with. Jerry Falwell (as was his father) is too tempting a target. And while it may not be charitable to say so, in truth I have wondered more than once if Franklin Graham is up to being his father’s son. He’s too of-this-world political and too cozy with Trump and his band of cronies for my taste, yet I have great admiration for his work as head of Samaritan’s Purse and the 2014 Ebola crisis, particularly in Liberia in West Africa. Samaritan’s Purse was founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Samaritan’s Purse Canada was established in 1973.

In 2014 Médecins Sans Frontières, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, the highly respected international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization, founded in Paris in 1971, stretched beyond their limits in Guinea and Sierra Leone in the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, asked Samaritan’s Purse to take over the management of ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Hospital – the main facility, founded in 1965 by the medical mission group Serving in Mission (SIM) USA, caring for all Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia.

It would be impossible, I think, for most of us to be unmoved by the steps Franklin Graham took to rescue Dr. Kent Brantly, 33, medical director at Samaritan’s Purse Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, who had contracted Ebola, and who became the first patient ever medically evacuated and repatriated to the United States with a confirmed case of Ebola, to be treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, largely due to Graham’s efforts.

Jeanette has taught me many things, but one of the earliest points she made with me when I was writing scathing editorials, was that when it comes to individuals – real flesh-and-blood people – it is often both difficult and dangerous to assign motive and infer intention into hearts we cannot know, and truth be told, that includes men like Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham, as painful as that is to admit at times.

Terry Mattingly, who describes himself as a “prodigal Texan,” and is a parishioner at St. Anne’s Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, elucidates the complexities at play well in his post, ” What’s the one thing journalists need to learn from the Christianity Today firestorm?,” which was published yesterday in GetReligion.org, an independent website, which he founded and edits, and which takes as its mission wrestling with issues of religion-beat coverage, as it critiques the mainstream media’s coverage of religion news. The post can be read at: https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2019/12/23/whats-the-one-thing-journalists-need-to-learn-from-the-christianity-today-firestorm

We desperately need more of the likes of John McCandlish Phillips, who died in 2013 at the age of 85, and lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952. You can read more about him here at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

As for Mattingly, his father was a Southern Baptist pastor and his mother a language arts teacher. He double-majored in journalism and history at Baylor University and then earned an M.A. at Baylor in Church-State Studies and an M.S. in communications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

He worked as a reporter and religion columnist at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News. In 1991, Mattingly began teaching at Denver Seminary and has lectured at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

While we should tread with caution in judging the intentions of others, as Mattingly reminds of us, we are also called to bear witness through the example of our own lives. While it may only be an errantly attributed aphorism, Abraham Lincoln’s “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest” speaks a powerful truth.

More and more, the world is in need of Christian witness such as that from Christianity Today, evangelicalism’s flagship magazine, as an earlier era was moved by the witness of German theologian and pastor Martin Niemöller’s, whose prophetic words are inscribed on a wall in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Hall of Witness, a memorial space on the ground floor:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Socialist.

“Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Jew.

“Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Galli’s Dec. 19 editorial, “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” and Dalrymple’s Dec. 22 update, “The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT’s President,” are both linked to below:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-evangelicals-editorial-christianity-today-president.html

As I write these words, I am given to ponder the three Bible verses below:

Joshua 24:14-15:

“Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Micah 6:8

“He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love [a]mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?”

Amos 5:24

“But let justice run down like water,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Faith and reason. Pray, think: Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker

Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker. Most have a decidedly Catholic flavour, but definitely not all, as my writing on religion can be as eclectic and wide-ranging into other areas of the Christian realm as my writing on non-religious topics can be. So, if you’re a Catholic, buckle in for some discussion of eschatology in the form of Bible prophecy, premillennial dispensationalism, Petrus Romanus, the Prophecy of Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes, the Antichrist, the False Prophet and The Rapture, and if you’re a Protestant evangelical … well, welcome to my world, which includes St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints.

Retroactively spiked: The post-publication killing of Msgr. Charles Pope’s blog post on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time “kill” a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/

EWTN: The late 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/ewtn-the-late-19th-century-english-catholic-poet-francis-thompson-and-the-hound-of-heaven/

St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Saints vs. Scoundrels – EWTN’s TV for the Thinking Catholic (and atheists, too)

Whoever said television can’t tackle big ideas apparently forgot to tell that to Benjamin Wiker. Tomorrow Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the network which presents around-the-clock Catholic-themed programming, founded by Mother Mary Angelica, which began broadcasting on Aug. 15, 1981 from a garage studio at the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, which Mother Angelica founded in 1962, will air in several different time slots Part 1 of its series Saints vs. Scoundrels, hosted by Wiker, a senior fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Wiker guides viewers through pairs of influential Catholic saints and thinkers and those the church considers important historical figures, but scoundrels and sinners nonetheless.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/st-augustine-and-jean-jacques-rousseau-saints-vs-scoundrels-ewtns-tv-for-the-thinking-catholic-and-atheists-too/

The Prophecy of Malachy

While most people looked at U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27 as a brief getting-to-know you session at the Vatican between two charismatic world leaders, who while they both champion economic social justice, are deeply divided philosophically on other moral issues such as abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, others see them working in concert ushering in an eschatological end times.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/

Blood Moon rising

Science and religion. In astronomical terms, on April 15 there was a total lunar eclipse. It was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series. But in religious terms, it was known as the first Blood Moon of the 21st century.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/blood-moon-rising/

News and religion: Where the twain meets

“Is this the Gate of Hell? Archaeologists say temple doorway belching noxious gas matches ancient accounts of ‘portal to the underworld.’” For a minute, I thought I must be reading a headline on April 4, 2013 (after checking to make sure it wasn’t April 1) from what had to be the second coming of the late Generoso Pope, Jr.’s Weekly World News, a supermarket “news” tabloid published out of Lantana and later Boca Raton, Florida from 1979 to 2007.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/news-and-religion-where-the-twain-meets/

Spiritual warfare

Spiritual warfare?

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”

Spiritual warfare was what Lewis was talking about almost six and a half decades ago, just as the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians almost 2,000 years earlier had said, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/

We’re caught in a trap: Suspicious minds

Way back when, 20 or more years ago, when I decided religion was a subject journalists should take seriously if they wanted to understand the world around them and what animates many people, I happened to read a book called Faith, Hope, No Charity: An Inside Look At the Born Again Movement in Canada and the United States, published 30 years ago in 1984 by Judith Haiven, now an associate professor in the Department of Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/were-caught-in-a-trap-suspicious-minds/

Today marks the Oct. 9 Feast of St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints

St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.

The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/today-marks-the-oct-9-feast-of-st-denis-patron-saint-of-paris-and-one-of-the-catholic-churchs-most-famous-cephalophore-a-k-a-head-carrier-saints/

John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died last year at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

Shemitah: The next sabbath year begins Sept. 25

Most of us are familiar with the concept of sabbaticals every seven years for tenured professors in academia, where their university employers release them from regular teaching and research duties to re-charge their intellectual batteries and perhaps pursue some specialized interest or write a book in some suitably warm climate. What more convivial or better place to write a monograph on your latest polar research than some island in the Caribbean after all is said an done?

The roots of such sabbaticals or shemitahs, also spelled as shmitas, however, long pre-date the modern or even medieval university. Their ancient roots are 3,000 years old and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judiasm. During a shemita year, the land is left to lie fallow. Israel has alloted $28.8 million to farmers for the upcoming shemitah year, budgeting $863,000 less than the last shemitah, when lands were left fallow seven years ago. More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October.

The next shemitah year – and the first since the demise of Lehman Brothers investment bank on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939 – begins in less than three weeks on Sept. 25, running until Sept. 13, 2015. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry and Emanuel Lehman in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, was the fourth-largest investment bank in the Unites States, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, especially in U.S. Treasury securities, research, investment management, private equity, and private banking.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/shemitah-the-next-sabbath-year-begins-sept-25/

High school redux

Being a Catholic high school graduate wasn’t high on the list of things top of mind when I moved to Manitoba in 2007. That’s mainly because my high school days were some 30 years behind me – or at least so I thought at the time.

Turns out, however, Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson, is originally from St. Catharines, Ontario and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, who – wait for it – just happen to be the same sisters who taught some of my classes from September 1971 to June 1976 when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English classes – and Grade 10 general math at Oshawa Catholic High School (previously known as St. Joseph’s High School and later Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School.) Sister Dorothy also taught high school in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as Oshawa.

Trying to teach me high school math must have given real meaning to terms like “long suffering” and “patience of a saint.” As I recall, there were two mathematics “streams” back then: “advanced” and “general.” Since these were in the days before there was much articulation of the concept of “bullying,” many of your classmates had no reservation about saying that “general” math was for “dummies” or “dunces.” Self-esteem aside, I’d have been hard-pressed to argue the point, especially since I struggled with math no matter what the label: algebra, geometry, functions and relations – shoot me now, just remembering the words, much less the symbols and equations. If I had known how many percentages I would have to convert as a journalist, I might have paid more attention to high school math, but perhaps not.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/high-school-redux/

Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’

The 10-day Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) from Sept. 4 through Sept. 14 just wrapped up yesterday. In the cinema world, TIFF is a big deal. An important arts event eagerly anticipated every September.

But flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar there is a whole slew of movies released over the last year or just about to be released, which  might surprise you both in their totality and who stars in them because Hollywood, for a season at least, has rediscovered the Christian movie genre and the religious, spiritual and supernatural themes that are woven into their fabric. In a word, Christian movies are “hot” in 2014. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for  Sodom or Gomorrah  in the vocabulary for many Christians, is this fall on the side of the angels. There is apparently an upside for Hollywood where commercial potential stands in for faith in salvation if need  be.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died in 2013 at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

A lanky 6’6” tall, Phillips, known also as “Long John,” kept a Bible on his desk. Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor at the New York Times, described him as “the most original stylist I’d ever edited.”

Abe Rosenthal, Times city editor in the early 1960s and later executive editor, said of Phillips: “He was an original. He had a very telling eye. He had a quiet merriment. His writing wasn’t heavy.”

When an editor wanted to chronicle the last piece of cheesecake sold at Lindy’s, the famed Times Square eatery in early 1969, Phillips got the nod. “What kind of a day is today?” wrote Phillips. “It’s the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy’s, you couldn’t get it.” He once described Wisconsin as the state that “bobs on a sea of curdled milk.”

Covering New York City’s famed St. Patrick’s Day parade in as a general assignment reporter in 1961, Phillips wrote,“The sun was high to their backs and the wind was fast in their faces and 100,000 sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who would hold with them, matched strides with their shadows for 52 blocks. It seemed they marched from Midtown to exhaustion.”

Or consider these two sentences from a routine story: “Two kinds of people wait in the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square. Some are waiting for buses. Others are waiting for death.”

A competitor, Pete Hamill, then a columnist for the New York Post, said of Phillips: “He used the senses. He looked. He listened. He smelled. He touched. There was a texture to his writing that was sensual.”

The New Yorker magazine described Phillips as “legendary,” “brilliant,” “much talented,” and “more interested in the truth and texture of a story than in scoring a scoop.”

An anomaly in almost every way, unlike most reporters, Phillips was not a particularly great story idea generator. He was rather the go-to-guy or the literary gun-for-hire when an editor had a bright idea for an assignment and he wanted it executed with grace.

Phillips’ most memorable story was written in 1965, on Daniel Burros, the 28-year-old leader of the state Ku Klux Klan. It ran on Page 1 on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1965, under the headline “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” It profiled the Grand Dragon of the New York State Ku Klux Klan, a chief organizer of the national Klan and a former national secretary of the American Nazi Party. It also went on to document that Burros was also a Jew – a former Hebrew school student who had been bar mitzvahed at 13. Burros committed suicide, shooting himself the day the article was published.

In the 1950s and 1960s, newsrooms were loud and chaotic places, with phones incessantly ringing and typewriter keys clanging, that didn’t resemble the quiet and orderly cubicle-divided insurance offices most do today. To say many of the characters that inhabited them as reporters and editors were rough around the edges, in their rumpled white shirts and flask of whiskey in the bottom desk drawer, would have been more simple observation than stereotype.

Phillips didn’t drink, smoke or gamble. And just as he felt called by God to unexpectedly get off the train at Penn Station in New York City en route from Baltimore to Boston, as a master sergeant being discharged from the army at the end of his service in 1952, and apply for a job, still in uniform, at the New York Times, with his only journalism experience having been brief stints at Boston Sport-Light and the weekly Brookline Citizen in Massachusetts after graduating from high school in 1947 so, too, he felt called to leave daily newspaper journalism behind in 1973.

By that time, he had written his first book, The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews in 1970, published by Bethany House Publishers in Minneapolis. Unlike his newspaper writing, the prose is for the most part turgid and largely impenetrable, interspersed with huge blocs of Biblical quotations that destroy what little flow there is to the text. I can testify to this personally having taken about 16 months to plough through it. That’s not to say the book’s thesis – the Devil, or the “Enemy” as we Catholics like to say – was plotting in the late 1960s and early 1970s to get the younger generation interested in the supernatural and mysticism of eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in order to lead them down the “path of spiritual ruination” is uninteresting.

Phillips denounced drugs, promiscuity, protest, long hair, short skirts, free love and the Sixties’ counterculture in general in a way that seems particularly and perhaps unavoidably historically dated today – sort of like looking at pictures of protests on U.S. colleges campuses, as one might see them now, through the prism of an old sepia photograph.

In fairness to Phillips writing in 1970, the events were contemporaneous with the times and not historical artifacts as they are 44 years later in 2014.

Phillips didn’t quite disappear completely from daily journalism. For the next eight years after leaving the New York Times in 1973, his byline appeared occasionally as a freelancer. In more recent years, he had had three opinion pieces published in the Washington Post on topics ranging from media ethics to what he saw as the excessive complexity of the U.S. tax system. In 2005 he took on two columnists at his old journalism alma mater, the New York Times, namely Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for heaping “fear and loathing” on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. “I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, … in a ghastly arcade mirror lately,” he wrote.

The World Journalism Institute, founded in 1999 after discussions between Joel Belz, Marvin Olasky, Nick Eicher and Robert Case, and located on the campus of The King’s College in New York City, established a McCandlish Phillips Chair of Journalism. The institute published Phillips monograph, Faith in the Daily News Chase in 2001.

He also wrote two other books, The Spirit World: A Christian newsman investigates the hidden powers of the supernatural, and his 1974 collection, City Notebook: A Reporter’s Portrait of a Vanishing New York, which was published by Liveright.

But for the most, John McCandlish Phillips, by all accounts, did not miss being a daily newspaper journalist during the second half of his life, even if he was the most gifted newspaper writer of his generation. John McCandlish Phillips died April 9, 2013.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22