Karl barth has for so long been a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of religious thought that his visit to America had something of the spectacularity of an unprecedented approach of a heavenly body. But when he took his seat in the chancel of the Rockefeller Chapel at Chicago University, and peered curiously at the 2400 people gathered to hear him; when he grinned puckishly while the chairman asked no one to disturb him with flashbulbs, he betrayed a kind of oldshoe homeliness that promptly transferred him from the celestial realm to the company of one's country cousins.