"Nowadays young people develop more quickly than they did in my day," says the Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, 83, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. In a new book, Touching on Christian Truth, Dr. Fisher proposes to help the young avoid the sin of fornication by reviving the ancient rite of betrothal. "It would have to take place with the full consent of the two families," he wrote. "It would, in fact, be a sacramental act, made, as indeed marriage itself is, essentially by the two persons themselves. After that, sexual intercourse between them would not be regarded as, in the moral sense, fornication." Marriage and children would follow when and if the two parties felt ready for it.

In Room 5207 of Washington's Capitol Building last week, Republican Senator Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon gave a party for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a very different kind of Republican. The presents people brought had a lot in common--stuffed elephants and teething rings, diaper pins and diapers decorated with the Confederate flag, a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh. There was ice cream, of course, and a jar of wheat germ labeled "Strom's secret formula." Thurmond's second wife, 24, is about to present the 68-year-old Senator with his first child. Said he modestly: "I feel very honored."

The April Azalea Festival in Norfolk, Va., headquarters of NATO's naval command for the Atlantic, has had 17 queens over the years to smile prettily in tribute to the Alliance. In December, Sir Winston Churchill's beauteous granddaughter, Arabella Churchill, 21, said that she would be delighted to be Azalea Queen No. 18. But last week the festival made public a letter from Arabella saying she had been reading up on NATO and had decided against azaleas. "My Grandfather used the phrase 'The Iron Curtain,' " she wrote. "It seems to be that what is facing us all now is the final curtain. The defence systems of the great powers are mutually infectious . . . and committed to ever-increasing growth and intensification."

Joan Baez had something special to sing about--Husband David Harris, 25, was free after serving 20 months for refusing to register for the draft. Joan, 30, and their 16-month-old son Gabriel met him at the penitentiary near El Paso; from there, they flew to a San Francisco press conference. David plans "getting my feet on the ground" and then (with the permission of his parole officer) to go back to resisting the Indochinese war and the Selective Service. His resistance will be nonviolent, because nonviolence is "the most powerful tool available to anybody in this society--or any other society--and the only revolutionary tool available to anybody."

It warms the cockles of an eleemosynary organization man's heart when his group decides to honor someone who is sure to be a big drawing card at the annual fund-raising dinner. So the choice of Bob Hope for the Family of Man Award of the New York City Council of Churches seemed especially gratifying. "The $150-a-plate award dinner is a major source of income," noted the executive director, the Rev. Dan M. Potter. Last week, though, some 20 young ministers led an angry anti-Hope revolt at a meeting of the council's General Assembly. "There is nothing in Mr. Hope's record showing public commitment to the three pressing issues that confront the council--poverty, racial justice and peace," said the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus of Brooklyn's St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church. Hope is known rather for his "uncritical endorsement of the military establishment and the Indochina war." After prolonged debate, the delegates decided to switch the award to the late Whitney M. Young Jr. Said Hope: "I'd vote for him myself."

The Manhattan hooker is no wistful Lili Marlene swinging a sad handbag under the street light. She is a feral and formidable bird of prey--as West Germany's ex-Finance Minister Franz Josef Strauss, 55, discovered at 2:30 one morning last week. Outside the Plaza Hotel just off Fifth Avenue, he was accosted by three women in a yellow car. One of them got out and suggested the possibility of deepening their relationship. "I took the whole thing from the ironic side," says Strauss. But the lady took the whole thing from another side, light-fingered his wallet and passport and zipped off into the car with them. Police promptly recovered Strauss's property, thanks to a cab driver who took down the license number, but bullnecked, pugnacious Strauss went home to a ribbing from the German press. Asked Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "Will the Bavarian peasants still understand a Strauss who was robbed by a woman's hand?"

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