HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK - TYPED QUOTATION SIGNED - HFSID 167748

HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
Harry Emerson Fosdick signs typed quote from On Being a Real Person
Typed Quote Signed: "Harry Emerson Fosdick". 5½x3½ card typed. In full: "Any personality trying to live a high life on the basis of a low idea as to who he is, faces distraction at the center of his endeavor. Whatever else religious faith does, it sees man as essentially spirit and not matter; it regards him as a sould with a body and not as a body with accidental mental and spiritual functions; it grounds his best in eternal reality and teaches him to esteem himself as a being of divine origin, nature, and destiny. Great religion furnishes the most stimulating answer ever given to the question Who am I? and the history of religious experience at its best is rich in illustrations of Adler's statement, 'By changing our opinion of ourselves we can also change ourselves'. -On Being a Real Person, pp. 262-63." Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) was ordained a Baptist minister in 1903. Although he was Baptist, he was liberal and became Pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in New York (1918-1924). In 1922, he delivered his sermon "Shall the Fundamentalist Win?" and became a central figure in the conflict between fundamentalists and liberal Protestants in the 1920s & 1930s. He presented the Bible as a record of the "unfolding of God's will," not as the literal "Word of God". In 1923, the Church ordered an investigation of his views and he resigned in 1924. He was immediately hired by the Park Avenue Baptist Church -whose most famous member was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who funded the construction of the interdenominational Riverside Church where Fosdick became the Pastor. It should be noted that Fosdick's brother, Raymond, ran the Rockefeller Foundation for three decades, beginning in 1921, and it funded the nation-wide distribution of his famous sermon that was re-titled "The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith". An outspoken opponent of racism and injustice, he also supported appeasement of Hitler-arguing "moral equivalence", i.e. that the democracies were to blame for the rise of fascism. Fosdick reviewed the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), was an active member of the American Friends of the Middle East, and a founder of the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land. Lightly soiled at edges. Two dark stains on verso (no show-through). Otherwise, fine condition.