My first contact with Germany was in 1921 when I visited European countries in a party conducted by that indefatigable world traveler Sherwood Eddy. We visited the Ruhr and Rhineland, where Germany was offering "passive resistance" to the efforts of Poincare to extract from a reluctant, vanquished nation the reparations which subsequently were found to be excessive and which were in effect paid by American loans (Dawes plan and Young plan). The French occupation of the Rhineland became ever more oppressive in the heat of the struggle and wrecked the economy of both nations. The British occupied the section of the Rhineland with Cologne as die center and rather ostentatiously disassociated themselves from the French designs.

It seems as if we are entering an era similar to the period after die Congress of Vienna. The cold winds of reaction have prevailed. The fires of domestic reform have gone out, extinguished by the excesses of some reformers and by the tactics of the forces of the status quo. The nation that gave birth to the A-bomb has succeeded in shocking the numbed consciences of the world by carrying out on a peasant nation die most destructive aerial bombardment ever unleashed. As Russia, England, Austria and Prussia conspired in Vienna to put out the danger of revolution, so now Russia, China and the United States are cooperating to save South Vietnam, the United States's ally, to halt the rain of bombs on die troublesome, sometime ally of the Chinese and the Soviets, to put out die fire mat threatened for so long to lead to a major power conflagration.

After witnessing ten years of carnage in Vietnam and the defeat of George McGovem who promised a moral (as opposed to an "honorable") way out of the war, the moral-religious community is left in the lurch. Too idealistic to give up and too realistic to do without results, we are in for some deep analysis of our ethical foundations.

I believe our problem is not that the churches have been involved,in too much politics, requiring of us now a return to evangelism or group encounter. Rather, we have been involved in too much of the wrong kind of politics. Whether Democratic or Republican, we have accepted the politics of Realism as the only way. If the Episcopal Church is "the Republican Party in prayer," the rest of the liberal church community may well be regarded as the Democratic Party in caucus.

Pacifists are sometimes taken seriously, but pacifism rarely. I mean pacifism as a coherent intellectual and social-ethical position. The theologians of liberation and revolution, for example, are extremely critical of ethical Realism, yet they continue to accept Realism's rejection of pacifism. The dogmatic assumption that Niebuhr's arguments against pacifism were and are decisive has almost precluded serious intellectual attention to pacifism. Our socialethical reflection and options are the poorer because of this lack. John Howard Yoder, however, has formulated a pacifist position that provides a rationale and form for a Christian social ethic that actively engages the world. Yoder's highly creative work should stimulate a renewed interest in this traditional option.

At the time the American public seemed to take the Mylai massacre itself in stried Lieutenant William Calley's conviction produced a massive response, with many signs of anger, bitterness and indignation. The pattern should not surprise any student of history or social science. It is consistent with what we have learned from Nazi Germany and elsewhere about the banality of evil, the dividing line between in-group and out-group, the unquestioning nature of obedience to legitimate authority. Yet the intensity of the public outcry against the conviction and the seemingly complex pattern of reactions called for some explanation. We looked for part of the explanation in a national survey we conducted about a month after Calley s conviction was announced.

Gustavo Gutierrez is a native of Peru and professor of theology at the Catholic University of Peru. He is also chaplain to the National Union of Catholic University Students and advisor to the Latin American Bishops Conference. Gutierrez is widely credited with having coined the term "liberation theology," and with the recent publication of his A Theology of Liberation (Orbis; 323 pp.; $7.95/4.95) North American readers are challenged by a major systematic effort to articulate the meaning of the Christian gospel in terms attuned to the revolutionary ferment in Latin America.

A certain eclecticism is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of American philosophy. The deep structure which generates the whole range of views and positions in American philosophy is quite easy to locate. It is this: there are fifty states in the Union. These can be listed in one column. In a second column, one can list all available philosophic schools: positivists, pragmatists, Platonists, Thomists, Hegelians, Wittgensteinians, existentialists and so forth.

There is now a very simple and absolutely reliable law, which runs as follows: To every possible pair of elements, drawn one each from the two columns, there corresponds at least one living, real, concrete professor of philosophy. In other words, there is at least one Texas Hegelian, one Nebraska phenomenologist, one West Virginia Wittgensteinian, one Ohio Kantian and so forth. Of course there may be more than one, but in all circumstances there is at least one.