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Brown helped McCarthy, now Minnesota's junior Senator, win re-election to a seat in Congress, and was appalled at the amount of Protestant bigotry that cropped up around election day. Ever since, he has tried to interpret Catholic problems to his fellow Protestants, as well as Protestant problems to Catholics. A talented writer (he has published some first-rate reminiscences in The New Yorker}, Brown shares with his old teacher Reinhold Niebuhr an interest in trying to make theology relevant to the solution of contemporary social problems. One motive in moving to a secular campus is to help bring theological excitement to the parish and nonseminary world; yet Brown believes that theologians should not take themselves too seriously: "There is something demonic in people who have God under their belt." He also believes that religious thinkers should follow their Christian convictions into action; last July, he spent 24 hours in a Florida jail for taking part in a Freedom Ride.
∙ROGER LINCOLN SHINN, 45, Wm. E.
Dodge Jr. professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. Dr.
Shinn, a member of the United Church of Christ, is a theological student of atheism, an adept Christian critic of such contemporary ideological trends as existentialism and linguistic analysis. "Let's welcome the modern world," he says. "Let's look for the good in secularism." Son of a clergyman, Shinn studied English literature at Ohio's Heidelberg College, theology at Union. Refusing a ministerial deferment, he entered the Army in 1941, was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, and ever since has had little patience with theology that is "remote from the affairs of the people." Shinn says: "We hear a lot about dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. I'm more interested in hearing talk between the Protestant and the atheist." He seems to be engaged in that kind of talk himself: one of his works in progress is an analysis of contemporary views of freedom. Shinn has also just finished a book on the problems of Christian education, and is chairman of a committee that is writing a study of race relations for the National Council of Churches. Colleagues, however, predict that his major work will be in the field of Christian ethics.
∙SCHUBERT OGDEN, 34, associate professor of philosophical theology at Southern Methodist University. Born in Cincinnati and a graduate of S.M.U.'s Perkins School of Theology, Ogden is one of the nation's most persuasive interpreters of Rudolf Bultmann's "demythologized" Christianity (TIME, Sept. 24, 1956). Methodist Ogden was denounced as an "antichrist"' by Texas fundamentalists after his Bultmannian study, Christ Without Myth, was published last fall. Ogden insists that he is "a Christian only by being a modern man," and being modern to him means explaining religion in terms that are acceptable to contemporary scientific and technical thought. He believes that the purpose of such Christian dogmas as the Crucifixion and the Resurrection is "to help explain to us what it means to exist as a human being in the world." Because the scriptural wording of such truths makes little sense to modern man, theologians must restate them in a new way.