1972 is the centennial of the death of Frederick Denison Maurice, most famous for his leadership in the short-lived, though influential, Christian Socialist Movement of 1848–1854. Maurice's theological works have always been widely respected, but even among professional theologians and historians of thought there is little really precise knowledge of his views, because his writings — prodigious both as to number and length — are often discouragingly chaotic and, taken separately, fragmentary and inconclusive. Several short books on Maurice have given helpful, though usually somewhat impressionistic, expositions of his thought, but as yet no one has published in English a full-dress analysis of his theology and its philosophical foundations.

The growing general awareness that the order of nature within which man lives is a delicate ecological balance — a balance which cannot be indiscriminately exploited by men much longer without destroying the continuing possibility of human life — has not been without repercussions among theologians. There is an increasing attentiveness to nature as a theological problem and an interest in developing theologies of ecology and conservation. In addition there appears to be a growing belief that the theological focus on “history” in recent years has been extravagant or even entirely misplaced: it has turned attention in theology away from the natural world, which is “our real home”; it has led to a theological ignoring of the natural sciences and has thus helped to isolate theology from some of the most important and influential streams of human learning in modern culture; and it has contributed to and mightily re-enforced man's sense of self-importance and insularity, for history is preeminently the human story, and the “God of history” seems principally involved in transactions with men (although of course he is said to be the creator and father of all). What we need, we are told, is a “theology of nature” that will enable us to understand the orders of life and being within which we live and of which we are part, and even a “natural theology” that will illuminate for us, and teach us properly to worship, the God implicit in nature.

In his search for the key to Hebrew metrics, George Buchanan Gray devoted considerable attention to the acrostic poems of the Old Testament. Since they are by no means typical of Hebrew poetry generally, it may be doubted whether they provide a suitable base on which to formulate principles governing the nature of the metrical systems employed by the biblical poets. Furthermore, the fact that acrostic poems have a rather rigid structure may have encouraged greater independence on the part of the poet in working out internal configurations so that a wider range of variation results, partly from the desire to avoid monotony, than would otherwise be the case. The great virtue of acrostic poems is that lines or stanzas are regularly marked off by words beginning with successive letters of the alphabet. Thus in the Book of Lamentations, the first four chapters are regular acrostics, while the fifth chapter follows the same pattern but without making use of the alphabetic device itself. In the first three chapters, three-line stanzas are the rule; in chapters one and two each stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, whereas in chapter three, each of the three lines of the stanza begins with the same letter of the alphabet. Thus the first word of the first stanza of each of the poems begins with the letter 'ālef; in the case of chapter three, the second and third lines of the stanza also begin with 'ālef. The first word of the second stanza begins with bēt; again in chapter three, the second and third lines also begin with bēt. Chapter four follows the same pattern as chapters one and two, except that the stanzas have two lines instead of three.

A question which historical critical scholarship can no longer evade is whether it still contributes fundamentally to the strengthening of faith, or whether it is effecting its dissolution. Where biblical research continues to be done within the framework of Christian convictions, a crisis of identity threatens, since the historical critical approach with its related methodologies tends to dissolve the most fundamental assumptions of the New Testament Christian faith, namely, that salvation is possible only in relation to Jesus Christ. William Mallard focused sharply on this problem when he pointed out that even “when critical research supports a historical religious claim, the character and function of that claim is thereby undermined, and the past event in question loses the force of revelation.” In the same context J. Maxwell Miller argued that there could be no resolution of the conflict between critical inquiry and the biblical view of history because a historical critical understanding can have no place for God's repeated “intrusions” into the course of the Old Testament history. To use Mallard's formulation, a critical explanation for these divine intrusions into the Old Testament history effectively abandons the Old Testament understanding itself. According to Miller: “If the Jewish historian does not offer a natural explanation for the origin of the Exodus traditions, he is untrue to the critical method of historical research. If he does offer a natural explanation, he destroys the basis of his Jewish faith — i.e., that God intruded upon human history at the time of the Exodus and made a covenant with the fathers which applies even today. The same would seem to be true of the Christian historian who attempts to deal with the incarnation or the resurrection.”

The papal condemnation of Americanism in 1899 and the allegation that Americanism was a practical preface to Modernism has given rise to a considerable amount of literature attempting to determine just what Americanism was. This literature has been unsuccessful, however, in detecting any unity in the apparently isolated and unconnected liberal actions and opinions of the Americanists. These studies give the impression that the Americanists never defined what they were promoting, and that their only program was a series of unconnected actions and opinions which signified a certain “liberalism.” Opinions and actions relative to the Church's relation to social questions, to the problem of Catholic schools, German nationalism within American Catholicism, the founding of the Catholic University of America, and participation in the interdenominational World Parliament of Religions would appear to have little in common. In this light it has been concluded that Americanism was primarily a matter concerning a troublesome French Church.

It is suitably ironic that Socrates' classic submission to Athenian injustice some centuries before Christ provides, in the face of contemporary criticism of traditional education, amazing relevance for our time. Does citizenship make it immoral to defy the injustices of one's country?