THE 1960s: RELIGION: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

Muhammad Ali defeated Sonny Liston on 25 February 1964 for the World Heavyweight Championship. He then confirmed rumors that he had converted to the Nation of Islam. He was stripped of his title in 1967 when he refused induction into the military for religious reasons. The Supreme Court overturned that conviction in 1971, stating that he had been improperly drafted.

In 1966 Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer of Emory University published The Gospel of Christian Atheism.

In 1961 Jim Bakker married Tammy Faye La Valley. They joined Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network in 1965 and in November 1966 began their successful religious talk show on that network.

In 1967 David B. Berg, operating originally out of the Light House Mission coffeehouse near the pier in Huntington Beach, California, began to convert the hippies in the area. He later turned his mission into the Children of God, one of the Jesus People groups.

In 1961 William R. Bright, organizer of the Campus Crusade for Christ, established the center for his national movement at Arrowhead Springs, California.

In 1967 William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Yale University chaplain, offered his chapel for draft resisters. He joined in issuing "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority." He was later arrested and convicted for conspiring to interfere with the draft. His conviction was overturned.

In 1967 Fr. Charles E. Curran was removed from the faculty of the Catholic University for his opposition to the Roman Catholic teachings on contraception. Protests lead to his reinstatement, but not a change in his views. He published Absolutes in Moral Theology in 1968 and in 1969 edited Contraception: Authority and Dissent, which included his essay titled "Natural Law and Moral Theology."

In 1963 Bill Gaither wrote his widely recorded song "He Touched Me." In 1969-1970 he was named Songwriter of the Year by the Gospel Music Association, the first of these awards given to him.

In 1960 Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, the largest Orthodox church in the United States, joined in organizing the Conference of Orthodox Bishops to bring the various Orthodox groups into contact.

Sr. Mary Corita was asked to paint the fifty-foot mural for the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1964-1965). A teacher of art at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, her serigraphs and posters attracted wide attention. She left her order at the end of the decade, resuming her name Corita Kent.

In 1960 Dr. Nathan Gluek, president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, established a branch, the Hebrew Union College Biblical and Archeological School, in Jerusalem, the first center in Israel for the teaching of Reform Judaism. He published his Deities and Dolphins: The Story of the Nabataeans in 1965, the result of his extensive archeological explorations in Palestine.

In 1962 Kathryn Kuhlman published her best-selling I Believe in Miracles on spiritual healing. In 1967 she began television broadcasts of her healing services from her headquarters in Pittsburgh.

Joseph Irwin Miller, a member of the Disciples of Christ and president of the Cummings Engine Company, was elected president of the National Council of Churches in 1960 for a three-year term. He was the first layman to hold that position.

In October 1961 Pat Robertson opened his Christian Broadcast Network in Portsmouth, Virginia. In 1963 he began his "faith partnerships," asking seven hundred of his viewers to pledge support of ten dollars a month. The response was enthusiastic, and his television network quickly moved to success.

In 1961 Robert H. Schuller opened a new drive-in/walk-in building for his Garden Grove Community Church in Garden Grove, California, holding on to the memory of the church's beginnings in a local drive-in movie theater. He shortly added a nine-story office building, the Tower of Power. The growth of his congregation was so spectacular that in 1969 he organized the Robert H. Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership. In 1963 he published God's Way to the Good Life and in 1967 Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking.

In 1969 Jimmy Swaggart began the television broadcast of "Camptown Meeting" on stations in Atlanta, Houston, and Saint Paul. He had established his career with his annual recordings of gospel songs and his successful revivals in Pentecostal churches.