Interfaith Ordination

Fond of setting precedents is the 111-year-old First Unitarian Congregation of Rochester, N. Y., where the theory of evolution was first expounded from a U. S. pulpit, the first Woman's Rights Convention met in 1848, and interfaith services were pioneered. Last week the First Unitarian Congregation set what it believed was another precedent: it invited two rabbis to help ordain Member James Ziglar Hanner to the Unitarian ministry, closed the ordination service with the medieval Hebrew hymn Yigdal, sung in English.

No Christian, but bland-voiced Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, occasional contributor to The Nation, gave Minister Hanner his pastoral charge. Not from the Bible but from an ancient Jewish book of moral teaching, The Ethics of the Fathers, came Rabbi Bernstein's text. This week tall, grey-templed Minister Hanner, a 34-year-old onetime agnostic who got religion by acting in amateur dramatics with the First Unitarian's Gannett Players, began the practical application of his charge. The place: Nantucket's Second Congregational Meetinghouse, built in 1808 at the height of the whaling boom and so well endowed that it even has a special fund to keep its dome gilded in perpetuity.

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