The movement for goodwill between Jews and Christians received a fresh impetus in the election of an Executive Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America for special work in the field of Jewish Christian relationship, an announcement by the Federal Council states.
The new executive is Rev. Everett Clinchy who for several years has been the minister of the college church of Wesleyan University. Mr. Clinchy is well known in religious and educational circles because of the intercollegiate parleys on education which he developed at Wesleyan and which he has organized annually during the last five years. Twenty colleges send representatives to these parleys.
The Federal Council’s Committee on Goodwill between Christians and Jews, under which Mr. Clinchy will do his future work, represents one of the more recent developments in the program of this federation of twenty-eight denominations, the announcement states. The Committee was created about four years ago for the purpose of cultivating better understanding between adherents of the two faiths and providing practical cooperation in social and international tasks. Its former Executive Secretary was John W. Herring, who has resigned to take up work in the general field of adult education. The chairman of the committee is Rev. Alfred Williams Anthony, who was chiefly responsible for the undertaking of this work by the Federal Council. Closely cooperating with the Federal Council in this program is the National Conference of Jews and Christians, a body made up of leaders of the two groups under the chairmanship of Roger W. Straus.
Mr. Clinchy enters upon his new work immediately following his return from an extended visit in the Near East, in which he has been studying the ways in which the Christian colleges in Constantinople, Beirut, Cairo and Athens are developing the spirit and practice of cooperative goodwill among the members of various religions and races. He also spent some time in Palestine looking into the existing conditions in the relations of Christians, Jews and Moslems to one another in that area.
Mr. Clinchy’s experience at Wesleyan has already brought him into intimate contact with problems of cooperation among various religious groups. An intercollegiate symposium on religion, held last December, brought to that campus Catholic, Protestant and Jewish representatives for an exchange of experience and a general discussion of religious viewpoints. Mr. Clinchy has also become greatly interested in the public forum as a method of adult education, as a result of his having developed a forum in Middletwon, Conn. which has had as its speakers outstanding leaders, the announcement declares.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
