Beyond the bland facade- of China's great open cities and the green abundance of its showplace communes lies a vast country in obscuro —a China through the looking glass. In this, some say imaginary, country, people do not converse in People's Daily platitudes, but use a distractingly earthy language, enriched with sly puns and ancient proverbs; young men sing melancholy songs and brood over lovers and lost illusions; sons and daughters esteem their families above the Party; there are thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes; vilage cadres keep “one eye open and one eye shut” to sideline business activities; women quarrel hysterically over their woks in communal kitchens; speculators slip in and out of towns buying and selling ration coupons; underground factories operate; farmers lavish care on their private plots while neglecting the collective lands; and massive numbers of the Chinese peasantry, immemorially patient and industrious, labor daily under hardship and deprivation for three meals of rice gruel and sweet potatoes a day.

Among the many curious questions raised by the Portuguese revolution is: Why did so many career officers, proudly wearing the decorations of a colonialist fascist state, emerge as such passionate militants of the left? Three explanations are commonly offered. First, it is said, the social origins of the younger officers are closer to the working class than to the aristocracy; second, contact with African freedom fighters convinced them that they too should be Third World revolutionaries; and third, social intercourse with educated draftees drew them into the contemporary climate of opinion.

Among the many curious questions raised by the Portuguese revolution is: Why did so many career officers, proudly wearing the decorations of a colonialist fascist state, emerge as such passionate militants of the left? Three explanations are commonly offered. First, it is said, the social origins of the younger officers are closer to the working class than to the aristocracy; second, contact with African freedom fighters convinced them that they too should be Third World revolutionaries; and third, social intercourse with educated draftees drew them into the contemporary climate of opinion.

Odeh Mutawe Korian was late for his deportation hearing. His brother and an interpreter sat ill at ease in the chamber where the immigration judge and the government prosecutor exchanged annoyed glances as the minutes ticked by. At 9:15 A.M., fifteen minutes late, an unshaven, disheveled little man rushed in followed by two Immigration Service agents, nodded curtly at no one in particular, and slumped into a chair. He stared morosely at a spot on the table before him.

“Please remove your hat,” the judge said. The little man reached up to tear off his beret without shifting his gaze, avoiding all the eyes fixed upon him.

I met Makoto Matsuo, leader of the group mat cuts down its rivals with steel pipes in tea parlors and that rampages, with staves and rocks, among innocent train passengers, in a tiny cubicle of a room on the ground floor of a three-story business office building that would normally have no trouble blending into the gray alikeness of a hundred nondescript neighborhoods of Tokyo.

The room was tightly if crudely sealed off from the rest of the building, its walls a patchwork of odd-shaped cardboard pieces and old blankets with patterns you were likely to find in the tourist shop of a Navajo reservation. We entered from the street, ducking our heads under a steel shutter that had been raised part way to let us in and that was then quickly lowered to seal us off from the outside.

At 4:15 on the rainy afternoon of February 3, 1975, a San Diego Sheriff's Department SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team mistakenly shot and killed fifteen-year-old Leland Phelps in Oceanside, California. The boy was being held hostage by a barricaded sniper. Seconds after Phelps was shot his captor, an out-of-work twenty-year-old carpenter, took his own life. A large gathering of spectators had pressed in to watch the drama. Many who saw what happened, and many others who later analyzed it on the basis of reports, blamed the police for the outcome. There is a widespread feeling that the police themselves created the situation, spawning circumstances of confusion and fear from which, in the language of law enforcement, “fatal force” was the logical result.

If there is a challenge weighted by more responsibility and beset by more uncertainty than that of world hunger, I am not aware of it. The possibilities of tragedy are so appalling, the political obstacles to solution so stubborn, the economic realities so complex, the future so unpredictable, and human moral potential so unpromising that one is tempted to put the tougher ethical questions aside and be content to preach the need for more charity. God knows we need more charity. But preaching charity does not finish the job of helping people understand their Christian obligation in the face of the world's hungry people. Meanwhile, we cannot achieve moral responsibility by demanding a better and simpler world in which to practice it. Nor can we wait with ethics until we are wise enough to do it well.

Faust tells his servant, Wagner, "The past, my friend, is a book with seven seals. What you call the spirit of the ages is in reality the spirit of the men in which the times are reflected." What is happening to Reformation historiography today in the light of new ideological commitments illustrates Faust's point.

The historical interpretation of the Protestant Reformation was, up until the nineteenth century, ordinarily based upon what has been called classical Protestant and Catholic scholarship. Roman Catholic scholarship regarded the Reformation as a great misfortune that destroyed Catholic civilization and ruptured European unity. Luther was a rebel who opened the door to the violent revolutions patterned after his own rebellious and irresponsible conduct.