Death
On Sunday, July 5, 1936, S. Parkes Cadman was preaching at an interfaith service in upstate Westport, New York, when he suddenly collapsed from acute appendicitis. He died a week later, on July 12, at a Plattsburg, New York, hospital of peritonitis. After his death, he was lauded by NBC president Lenox R. Lohr, who said, "As the first minister of the air, he was identified with radio beginning in 1923. Since that time more than 500 sermons reflecting the inspiring thought of Dr. Cadman have been broadcast." New York City's Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning said Cadman had "a noble record of service as a citizen and as a Christian minister." Rev. Cadman was buried in Brooklyn, New York, where he is memorialized in Cadman Plaza, named in his honor by New York City in 1939. The Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn was renamed Cadman Memorial Church in 1942 in his memory.
In a high irony, however, Cadman Church was a prime player in opposition to an ecumenical movement that witnessed the Congregational Christian Churches merge with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ. In 1949, the church sued the Congregational Christian moderator in order to forestall merger talks; the case stayed in the courts for several years before being dismissed and the merger taking place in 1957. Today, Cadman Church is a member of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, a group of congregations that opposed the UCC merger.
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In every unbeliever’s heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic’s Hell.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
“...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.”
—Helen Prejean (b. 1940)