Sophia Lyon Fahs |
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The ministry
of Sophia Lyon Fahs to children, parents and teachers exclaims:
Religion is education, the drawing forth of the latent powers of
people. She worked with Harry Emerson Fosdick at the Riverside Church
and simultaneously taught religious education at Union Theological
Seminary when Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were teaching there.
At that time Mrs. Fahs was technically not a minister. She was not
ordained until she was 82. Though she had completed her theological
studies and received her divinity degree years before, she did not
bother to be ordained until a Unitarian church in Montgomery County,
Maryland, prevailed upon her to let them honor her for her intensely
adventurous struggle against the enfeebling religion she inherited
and toward the humanly ennobling religion she ably helped to advance.
The most vital symbol of Dr. Fahs' contribution to life was the
New Beacon Curriculum in Religious Education, which she began
editing in 1937. Published by Beacon Press, it grew to some 50 books
used not only in the church schools of several faiths but also in
day schools, nursery schools, and homes. These books express religion
not only with respect to the living past and future but also with
regard to the immediate experience of children in relation to siblings
and parents, wind and water, seeds and animals, the visual arts
and the birth of religions. The editor of Parents Magazine
(on which she long served as a member of its Advisory Editorial
Board) has said of her: "She has helped millions of parents
in their own search to find ways of nourishing their children's
spiritual development."
The liberal religious realism of Mrs. Fahs is well expressed in
her book Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds, where
she said: "Life in this age of emphasis upon the sciences encourages
and even requires a broadening of the realm of human religious and
ethical responsibility until it includes our relations to all forms
of Reality. This changed philosophy that I believe is slowly developing
in our time, and that may help us to become more integrated persons
again, is not only a realistic humanism. It is also a realistic
naturalism, of each person's being part of a Universal Living Unity."
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