Religion: According to Steinbeck

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” So began the author of St John’s Gospel, in a classic Christian definition of God the father’s eternal coexistence with his son. Last week Novelist John Steinbeck, in Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize for literature, suggested a new gospel to match the beliefs and ambitions of modern man.

“We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God,” he said. “Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over life and death of the whole world of all living things. Having taken God-like power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased, In the end is the word and the word is man, and the word is with men.”