Seminarians Paid to Fight War

Two Harvard Divinity School students working with a clergy group organizing anti-war anti-draft activities are receiving $750 each to support the work from a Divinity School program.

The two students' anti-war work is part of a Diviniy School campaign to give some seminarians a "practical political education," Tjaard G. Hommes, director of the Office of Field Work Education, said yesterday. Hommes' office is responsible for he project.

Hommes expects to extend the program further by placing several seminarians in political campaign headquarters next year. Each of the Divinity students in the campaigns will receive $600 to $750 scholarships, which will come from the Divinity School budget.

David F. Coffey and John E. Cupples, third-year Divinity students, have been given the money to work under the Rev. Harold R. Fraye, Chairman of the Massachusetts branch of the Clergymen Concerned about the War and pastor of the Eliot Church in Newton. They will help him to organize local elergy anti-war activities. Cupples initiated the week-old project and asked Fraye to join him because, Cupples said, "he is the most politically active clergyman" on Vietnam in Greater Boston.

Preaching in Suburbs

Political field work is the latest extension of the Divinity School's program, to integrate classroom studies with community problems. Before 1961, when the program began, Hommes explained, student involvement with the outside community consisted of "spending three or four hours preaching in the suburbs on Sunday morning for some extra money."

Herbert D. Long, dean of students at the Divinity School, said that the anti-war and anti-draft activities were a logical extension of the civil rights activities of the early 60's. They will once more bring "the relationship between church and state before the public," Long commented. "And it is always necessary to reevaluate that relationship," he added.

Long hopes that the political action field work will help provide information on Congressional Legislation in which the church should become involved.

The work in the community coupled with a new series of seminars at the Divinity School will make the students "reflect on field work and give them a better understanding of the pulse of society," Hommes explained.

The new bi-monthly seminars cover such subjects as "The Church and the Political Power Structures" and "Issues of the Church and Its Mission." Faculty members are very much in favor of the seminar, Hommes commented. They are limited, however, to the 85 field workers.

Hommes hopes that the seminar program can be extended to include joint seminars with other Harvard graduate school students in order to expose seminary students to various problems such as those faced by city planners, politicians, lawyers, and doctors.