Clerical Columnist

For the first time in many a moon Dr. Joseph Fort Nerwton did not have to get up at 6 o'clock on weekday mornings. After eleven years the Philadelphia Episcopalian rector had given up his syndicated daily newspaper column, Everyday Religion. The flood of readers' letters that had put him to work at dawn's crack was beginning to subside

Tall, 63-year-old Dr. Newton had high blood pressure. Doctors had given him his choice. He might run his column or his parish (St. Luke and the Epiphany) but not both. He chose the parish, which he took over in 1938 just as Diocesan officials were about to close it as rundown.

Energetic Dr. Newton's sermons drew big congregations to the parish; he cleared the debt, had the church renovated. St. Luke and the Epiphany is still a going parish.

Its pastor was already a columnist when he went there. During its eleven years Everyday Religion appeared in 25 U.S. papers. Among them: the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Press, Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette (which ran the column on the front page as a tribute to Dr. Newton, who once had a parish in the city).

Now that his journalistic days are over, Rector Newton feels that he benefited most. Says he: "My readers taught me more than I taught them."

His prime lesson: "Fear is the worst enemy of human beings . . . the fear arising from sensitivity, manufactured hobgoblins, the fear of losing a job, of losing a home, of insecure old age."

He did not find his readers interested in theological matters ("except why evil is in the world") and he found that "more people are bored and irked by life than are hurt by it." He has good documentation for his findings. While he was writing Everyday Religion, he received some 90,000 letters from his readers.

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