Shortly after Oliver Franks was appointed British Ambassador to the United States by the Attlee government, he was treated to a short lecture by Winston Churchill on the United Kingdom's proper role in the world. After drawing three separate circles labeled Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States, Churchill drew a fourth circle labeled Britain, which partially overlapped each of the others. He went on to emphasize that the central task of British foreign policy was to carry on its relations with each area in a manner that contributed to a harmonious whole. This conceptual framework had considerable validity for that time, although the particular policies adopted ultimately proved too ambitious for a nation of Britain's size, her declining sense of imperial mission and lack of economic dynamism.

The emergence of an official policy of secularism in Bangladesh must be viewed as a major ideological landmark in the recent history of the Indian subcontinent. Analyzed in terms of legitimizing symbols, the abrupt change from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to the secular People's Republic of Bangladesh is a significant event. It is axiomatic that revolutionary changes in the symbols of statehood need not be, and generally are not, accompanied by corresponding attitudinal changes among the masses of the people. The symbols, after all, are formulated by a small political elite or even by one leader. But it is important to understand both what the leaders are trying to express by the symbols they choose and how these symbols are related to the political process and the general culture.

Being a woman," said Joseph Conrad, "must be a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealing with men." And for men, women have forever been a mystery—less a separate gender than an alien species to be prudently admired or nervously ridiculed but almost never understood. Eternally misperceived, women have been systematically disadvantaged: undereducated or overprotected, denied employment or unequally remunerated, excluded from the professions then excoriated as inept, driven to the limits of reason then indicted as hysterical. They have been used as property, abused as servants, neglected as things, patronized as children, idealized as fictions and enshrined as myths. When they have not been belittled by vilification they have been maligned by idolatry.

The Church and State in Poland are now passing through a period of relaxation. There are innumerable small changes that testify to this, but the most important are these:

• 1. Declarations by representatives of the Party and the Government have stressed equalirv of opportunity for each citizen regardless of his religion. The ultimate criteria in the evaluation of a worker are to be his work outlay, his capabilitv and his knowledge, and not his relationship to the Church.

• 2. The properties of the Catholic Church in the western territories were nationalized in 1961, and since then the Church has been in the position of tenant in that area. Now these properties have been returned. Elsewhere in Poland the Church remains the private owner of sacred objects and of small agricultural plots.

• 3. Talks between the episcopate and the Government, long suspended, have been resumed.

• 4. There has been some liberalization in the policy of taxation of the Church.

• 5. The policy of granting passports has been liberalized, and a greater number of permits are now being given to priests for trips to non-Communist countries either for scholarly purposes or in connection with agencies administered bv them.

Our bishops," says Father Frans Haarsma, professor of pastoral psychology at the Catholic niversity of Nijmegen, "made their fatal mistake at the time of the upheaval about the Dutch catechism. Cardinal Alfrink then minimized the objections of the Vatican as not being serious, a matter of minor corrections. Instead, he should have put his foot down and used the occasion to affirm the legitimacy of difference in theological viewpoints, while at the same time asserting the fundamental commitment of the Dutch Church to its unity with Rome. Pluriformity implies that one dares uphold the legitimacy of differentiation in theological viewpoints and that there are limits to Roman authority."

On December 18, 1972, the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver handed down a decision which may be momentous not only for churches but for all organizations (hospitals, colleges, symphony orchestras, museums and other "public charities") exempt from federal income tax under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The court took away a religious organization's tax exemption because it had engaged injpolitical activity, yet the decision has gone almost unnoticed in the great metropolitan newspapers of the East.

According to biblical tradition the people of Israel were led by Yahweh "out of Egypt's house of bondage." Salvation was liberation from forced labor. Thus, in accord with that same tradition, we recognize that all people are called to be God's people and that this means we are destined to guide our lives in personal freedom and responsibility. So the Decalogue, a manifesto of freedom and justice, is prefaced with the words: "I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of tne house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me."

There is a story evidently true, about a conversation between the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr as they were returning from a joint lecture at Princeton University sometime in early 1941. The two brothers had gone quite separate ways on what was then referred to as "the interventionist issue" (in Europe), and the debate continued in the car. H. Richard bemoaned the way in which nations had come to deal with each other—by way of lying, cheating, coercion, hatred, fear, aggression and so on. As he talked Reinhold became more and more restless until at last he burst forth: "Yes, but Helmut, don't you know that's how nations have always treated each other!"

I have been told that when Charles de Gaulle was asked what something he had said would mean to an ordinary Frenchman, he replied, "I do not know, I'm not an ordinary Frenchman." Similarly, I suppose I am not an ordinary reader of this book, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press; 1158 + xvi pp.; $19.95), but one who has for many years been surveying the same hills and valleys that Sydney Ahlstrom has traversed with camera and notebook. But while I have worked more as a topographer with the hope of making a usable map for the guidance of any who might wish to follow, Ahlstrom has pulled together an imposing slide show of the terrain and its inhabitants—a travelogue made up of thousands of discrete snapshots given unity primarily by the fact that all were taken by the same historically conditioned person.