Don Hamilton remembers the day well. This was back in 1966. He was 12 when a classmate asked him the question: \u201cDoes your father think that God is dead?\u201d\u009d Hamilton had to admit that the answer was yes.<\/p>\n
Before long, another friend\u2019s grandmother had started lobbying to have his father, William Hamilton, who was then a professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y, fired. Rather than going to church, the family started doing Bible reading at home, on their own. Eventually, they left Rochester. There was no way to hide Hamilton\u2019s radical view after the April 8, 1966, cover of TIME Magazine asked the same question as young Don\u2019s friend.<\/p>\n
The story by TIME religion editor John Elson\u201d\u201dand the gut-punch question on the cover, the magazine\u2019s first to include only text\u201d\u201dinspired countless angry sermons and 3,421 letters from readers. (For example: \u201cYour ugly cover is a blasphemous outrage.\u201d\u009d) The National Review responded by asking whether TIME were, in fact, the dead one. Bob Dylan even criticized it in a 1978 interview with Playboy: \u201cIf you were God, how would you like to see that written about yourself?\u201d\u009d Fifty years later, it remains one of the most iconic TIME covers ever produced.<\/p>\n