Out There in America

...You evidently do not listen to him or believe in the Christ he witnesses t o . " Said another whose reaction was totally different: "Let us give thanks for you—for the indignant, compassionate, emotional intelligence which is responsible for your collective w r a t h . " Not all of its subscribers have been overjoyed with the magazine...

...After the third wire was loosened, the mast buckled under the 1,800-pound tug of the remaining wires and, with its aircraft warning lights continuing to flash partway down, crashed into the thicket...

...one angry reader called it "biased, inflammatory, and venom-dripping...

...the following morning—George Washington's birthday, as he is fond of pointing out— when the rest of the commune had gone to sleep, Lovejoy donned heavy clothing for the winter chill, took a chain wrench and crowbar, and walked the four miles to the tower through the starlit night...

...From time to time, people in the subcultures and countercultures of American life have discovered the magazine and been drawn to it—from monks and nuns to hippies and convicts— and if there is any single explanation for their interest, it may lie in the contrast between Katallagete's view of education and the more conventional view commonly held in colleges and seminaries...

...Campbell and Holloway, native southerners, ordained Baptist ministers, and one-time sojourners in the ivy cloisters of Yale University, first met at a conference at Mercer University in Georgia in 1961...

...After reading Poisoned Power, a book by Dr...

...The first concerns the dismissal of the case arising out of the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee...

...Others, however, who had chosen to live in this town because of its bucolic charm (many of them connected with the University of Massachusetts fourteen miles to the south in Amherst), were appalled, and they sought ways to prevent the coming of the nuclear plants...

...Gofman and Professor Zinn...

...it has "studied war . . . and power politics so thoroughly since World War II that a class of American mandarins has been created by our graduate schools...

...Its early commentary on race relations in the United States and on the war in Southeast Asia, to mention two prominent issues, can be re-read now as unheeded warnings of impending disasters that came to pass...

...That is precisely what Lovejoy had on his mind...

...Through such frontal assaults on formal education— and on churches, political parties, social action movements, corporations, and indeed on all institutions that place self-preservation above any other purpose—Katallagete has gained a reputation as a radical Christian magazine that a substantial cross-section of people in and out of the organized church find provocative and at times prophetic...

...When Katallagete took the Reverend Billy Graham to task for consorting with political powers and principalities, an outpouring of letters covered the spectrum...

...Whether as a supplement or an alternative to the formal voices of institutional religion and education—or simply as a magazine that says for some institutionweary individuals the things they can't find the words to express—Katallagete has struck a small but responsive chord...

...I care about my town and Franklin County, about my fellow citizens, and about our children and our children's children...

...Among them are Catholic priests and nuns, Protestant preachers and laymen, Jews, students of Eastern religions, church dropouts, fundamentalists, agnostics, liberated blacks and women and young people, bureaucrats, businessmen, housewives, missionaries, soldiers, prisoners, protesters, professionals...

...Obvious potential witnesses skipped over and not interviewed, self-evident questions not asked...

...You must have accepted the torch from Thomas Merton's hands...

...He recalled for the court that as he undid each three-foot turnbuckle, the wires let go with a thundering twang...

...But that's not education—it's just training, and it's very narrow...

...Lovejoy, if asked, 'Would you do it again?' to think of that Constitution you profess to love so much...

...It is as an educational tool that the magazine may have had its greatest effect...

...He learned that the town of about 7,000 where he is a commune farmer was in a tizzy over the prospect of getting a $1.52 billion construction project...

...Gofman and Arthur Tamplin which, according to the authors, contains information the AEC tried to suppress...

...The idea was to have a magazine that said something about the Gospel, about what mainline Christianity isn't saying...

...Alas, once again, the allegations are directed to people in the top ranks of what we once called public service...

...Most of one entire issue was written by men and women who were or had been in prison...

...Specifically, the Judge accused the Bureau of paying a witness to give false testimony by giving him $2,000 and putting him up at a resort hotel where, the Judge implied, he spent his time drinking liquor and chasing women at government expense...

...administrators sharing them because they have to allocate resources according to the priorities set by society and by Caesar's universities, and by trustees drawn from the specialists in making and raising money in the American system...

...There it is: Christian college with state university, together and indistinguishable not under the Cross, but under the Great Yum-Yum Tree of Academic Excellence and Quality Education...

...I am helpless to tell you how powerfully honest, painful and provocative it i s , " wrote one reader...

...The "it"—the magazine—is the irregularly published journal of the Committee, a publication that bears two titles: the Greek word Katallagete, and its English translation, Be Reconciled...

...That's how it all started...

...Another said: "God has been doing a lot of strange things to my mind over the past three or four years, and you are one of the tools in His surgery kit...

...They see our magazine as a calculated maneuver to undermine them and their teaching...

...Holloway moved from the Mercer faculty to St...

...The townsfolk expected rising land values, relief from the 11 per cent unemployment rate, and lower taxes...

...Lovejoy claims lateral descent from Elijah Lovejoy* the martyred Abolitionist and editor...

...On the night of February 21, Lovejoy typed a fivepage statement outlining his reasons and put it in his pocket...

...District Judge Fred J. Nichol all but accused the Justice Department and the FBI of trying to frame the prisoners in the dock...

...And guess who had overall responsibility to investigate these matters...

...Holloway remains at Berea, and Campbell continues as the Committee's director, operating out of an office at his farm near Mt...

...Lovejoy's act was nothing less than an attempt to strike at the proliferation of nuclear power plants in general, and the impending construction of two huge ones in his own, nearby rural Montague, in particular...

...As Dr...

...Injustice Department Jerry Ford hasn't been in office long enough to fairly accuse him of dereliction of his duty to oversee the Justice Department...

...after studying other technical material and works on civil disobedience, and after consulting with Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University on the history of civil disobedience in the United States, Lovejoy concluded that a nuclear plant fit the legal definition of an infernal machine and that it was, therefore, his solemn duty to stop it in order to protect himself and his fellow townspeople...

...The " w e " in that statement is an amorphous, megadenominational, loosely confederated fellowship of people known as the Committee of Southern Churchmen...

...it is "preparing our minds and souls for the technological concentration camp...

...In the magazine, we have been more interested in those basics, and less interested in the technicalities...

...He might have added that it was the only trial to date on a charge of sabotage with an ecological motive, or "ecotage" in the shorthand of ecologists...

...Two 540-foot-tall cooling towers, shaped parabolically, will evaporate water from the nearby Connecticut River at twenty gallons a second...

...NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN (Nicholas von Hoffman is a regular commentator on the CBS Radio "Spectrum" series...

...John W. Gofman, a practicing physician and respected radiologist, testified at Lovejoy's trial, "The AEC hearing process is a sham that I wouldn't dignify by appearing i n . " Lovejoy also learned that Charles Bragg, a vice president of Northeast Utilities, had said in an unguarded moment that even if t h e town objected, the company would build the plants in Montague...

...He removed the three nuts holding the tower to a concrete pad and undid three of the outermost guy wires at the southern anchor point...

...They say we are not serious, or we're lacking in scholarly qualities, or we don't use footnotes in German...

...And the speaker is James Y. Holloway, the editor of Katallagete and one of two men (the other is the publisher and director of the Committee, Will D. Campbell) chiefly responsible for a journalistic and theological phenomenon that in nine years has made its presence felt in distant and disparate places...

...He has reconciled us men to himself through Christ, and he has enlisted us in this service of reconciliation...

...Northeast Utilities, a power company with plants, or interest in plants, in five of the six New England states, wants to build two 1,150-megawatt plants on Montague Plain, a sandy plateau of about four square miles covered with a climax forest of scrub pine, oak, and birch that sits across a Triassic fault...

...They concluded: "So there it is: Students sharing the same presuppositions because they must have them to finish high school and be 'admitted' to college...

...People in the seminaries generally look on us with disdain," says Holloway...

...A Church without Walls Nashville, Tennessee "We wondered what would happen if we did something to revive the old prophetic religion...

...The two most obvious reasons it has gained a loyal following are its content and its list of contributors...

...None other than soon retiring Henry E. Petersen, the Assistant Attorney General who, former President Nixon used to tell us, was doing such a superlative job getting to the bottom of Watergate...

...From first to last this has been the work of God...

...Think what the Constitution has done.for you...

...Scripture has an entirely different view, a different posture, a different direction...

...On the way, he stopped a squad car patrolling the road and requested a ride to the station...

...it has served the middle and upper classes, ignoring the needs of minorities and the poor...

...It is to the theological intelligentsia what (MORE) is to the established publishing empires: a radical, critical, utterly serious and at times outrageous alternative voice, unimpressed by the sacred cows and graven images of the institution and unafraid to describe them in the most acerbic and unflattering terms...

...As he told the court when his trial began September 17, Lovejoy lost no time finding out what this was all about...

...And the Christian colleges, they wrote, are no different...

...There he handed the desk sergeant his statement...

...Juliet, Tennessee...

...The Tower Toppler Greenfield, Massachusetts Samuel H. Lovejoy, a legend to some hereabouts as the tower toppler, stepped out of a Franklin County courtroom one afternoon last September a free man, but not free in the way he wanted to be...

...Destroying real property is punishable by six months in jail...

...It was this wispy red and white mast, supported by twenty-one guy wires, that Lovejoy saw outlined against the sky and the green Berkshire Mountains when he came back from a trip to the West Coast in June 1973...

...Two recent incidents indicate that the Department still poses a major threat to the equitable, orderly, and honest administration of justice...

...His latest book is ''The Americanization of Dixie...

...The Committee of Southern Churchmen was formed soon thereafter, with Campbell, then with the National Council of Churches, assuming the leadership...

...And Katallagete is still proclaiming, in a multitude of voices, the same basic message it expressed in its first issue, a message taken from Second Corinthians, Chapter 5: . . With us therefore worldly standards have ceased to count in our estimate of any man...

...Readers are scattered throughout nearly all of the fifty states and more than a dozen foreign countries...

...In a 1969 issue of Katallagete, Campbell and Holloway elaborated on their criticism of educational institutions, and in particular the church-affiliated colleges...

...Whatever the seminarians' public or private views of Katallagete may be, the magazine has found a following in and out of established religion that is remarkable for its size and diversity...

...JOHN EGERTON {John Egerton is a free-lance writer based in Nashville...

...The circulation list numbers about 9,000 people, most of whom respond to the magazine's suggestion that they "forward a contribution of $2 to $5 for four issues" (i.e., every year or two) to help cover the cost of printing and mailing...

...He did not deny that he had toppled the tower, but he labored to convince the jury that he had struck out against an unmitigated evil in a manner rooted in Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the traditions of Henry David Thoreau and the Abolitionists...

...Five books of writings that first appeared in Katallagete have been published, and Katallagete has also reached a larger audience when its articles have been reprinted in other publications: Presbyterian Outlook, The Episcopalian, The Center Magazine, The Catholic Worker, Christianity and Crisis, Social Action, Commonweal, Motive, and the Christian Science Sentinel...

...Treasury Secretary William Simon, the old fuel czar, is one of those suspected...

...But after hearing them both in the jury's absence, the judge exclaimed: "This is certainly the most unusual case ever tried in Franklin County...

...What he had hoped was that the jury would agree with him that his deed was a justifiable act of civil disobedience...

...Judge Nichol also suggested that the FBI had played a compromising part in an alleged rape involving the same witness...

...Personal property destruction carries a penalty of five years' imprisonment...

...Same pattern...

...We're simply not interested in political and social consequences—we're not trying to develop an alternative political and social structure...

...It is easier to imagine such a motley mixture of souls being reconciled to God than to imagine them being reconciled to one another...

...And still another said simply, "Thank you for slugging away for Christ's sake...

...Andrews College in North Carolina, and then in 1965 to Berea College in Kentucky, and the magazine—the Committee's "voice box"—published its first issue that summer...

...If nuclear plants are built, future generations will have to live with our radioactive waste...

...Workshops and seminars in churches, community groups, and prisons have also made use of particular issues...

...they have ''obtained operational capital from a rape of the land and from the sweat and backs of Indians, blacks, rednecks, hillbillies, Kluxers, Chicanos, peckerwoods...

...At a higher level, several members of Congress are accusing the Justice Department of failing to investigate a grave conflict of interest situation in which it is said that Phillips Petroleum was allowed to exploit government regulations so that it could make extra millions—double-dip profits they are called in Washington—off the sale of propane and liquid natural gas...

...PAUL LANGNER (Paul Langner is a reporter for The Boston Globe...

...The Judge said, "It's hard for me to believe that the FBI, which I have revered for so long, has stooped so low...

...In its attempt to "revive the old prophetic religion," it has become for several thousand people a sort of church without walls, a portable church with an ecumenical congregation of believers and doubters...

...The story of Petersen's new investigation is quite similar to the way he had the Bureau look into history's most famous third-rate burglary attempt...

...On this ecologically fragile plain Northeast Utilities erected a 500-foot-tall triangular steel mast festooned with instruments to collect a year's worth of meteorologie data before it could apply to the Atomic Energy Commission for a construction permit...

...He was acquitted on what laymen like to call a technicality and what jurists prefer to call a flawed indictment...

...Instead of trying to advocate a scheme to save the world, instead of programming and institutionalizing what we do or trying to create a cult of personality, we have tried to use the magazine to say not what we must do, but what we must be, what we are—reconciled...

...Lovejoy soon learned that the statutory way of intervention, provided for in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 as amended in 1970, would cost upward of $60,000 and was likely to be futile...

...Education, they said, is "worshipping at the shrine of academic excellence...

...It's more basic and fundamental...

...When I read you had assailed Billy Graham as a False Court Prophet, I was outraged," one woman wrote...

...He settled on the tower as the machine's symbol and harbinger...

...But Attorney General Saxbe surely has...

...In more than twenty issues—coming out sporadically, two or three times a year—Katallegete has become an abrasive countervoice to the journalistic and scholarly publications of the American religious establishment, and especially to the ruling elders of the nation's seminaries and theology schools...

...It's not a luncheon invitation we've all been clamoring for, it's justice...

...Aided by intense study of law and precedent and a few lawyer friends, Lovejoy defended himself at the trial...

...At 1 a.m...

...They, too, have middle and upper income orientation, and a contempt for their human and natural environments...

...I don't care about Sam Lovejoy," he told the jury as he paced the courtroom in his white linen jacket, rough cotton trousers, and laced boots...

...In discharging the defendants, U.S...

...It doesn't matter that Ford Administration officials are more affable and open if all else remains the same...

...The conventional view," says Holloway, "is that education is supposed to prepare people to make a living, to equip them with the proper graces to make it in mainline society...

...Judge Kent B. Smith, avuncular and benevolent toward the fumbling defendant, leaned over backwards for Lovejoy but sustained Prosecutor John Murphy's objection against letting the jury hear the testimony of Dr...

...faculty sharing the same ones because they have to get a 'degree' and an 'appointment' and tenure promotions and sabbaticals...

...As with the readers, the writers are a diverse group, including such prominent authors as Robert Coles, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Vine Deloria, Vincent Harding, Julius Lester, Thomas Merton, Jleinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy, Robert Sherrill, and William Stringfellow, as well as such philosophically divergent activists as Fannie Lou Hamer and Klansman Bob Jones...

...They're caught in a bind, required to keep up a professional front, and they're paranoid...

...In the end the judge directed a verdict of acquittal because two Montague town officials testified that the tower had been assessed as real property, whereas the indictment had charged "willful and malicious destruction of personal property...

...Perhaps the most unusual reproduction of a Katallagete article was the United Parcel Service's reprint of 500 copies of an essay by Lester on Merton to be used in " a n informal program for sensitizing managers and supervisors in our company to the problems of minority people...

...Copies have been widely used for assigned reading in colleges and seminaries— including some whose faculty have at times been most disdainful of the magazine...

...What he had wanted was to set a precedent...

...Judging from the magazine's mail, its mixed bag of readers mostly like what they are getting...

...He then began to walk toward the police station in the village of Turners Falls...

...It is as if God were appealing to you through us: In Christ's name, we implore you, be reconciled to God...

...Before calling in the jury to direct the verdict, Judge Smith told Lovejoy: " I beg you, Mr...