The focus of the world press upon Salvador Allende has, in 1972, given Chile the center stage occupied by Cuba fourteen years ago. For the first time in history a Marxist candidate who respected the rules of the game was freely elected by a democratic nation. So much is well known. What the “Popular Unity” program is all about and the difficulties encountered in the first year of government are not so well known. Nor, more particularly, have Christian attitudes toward developments in Chile received the attention they deserve. Both in Chile and in other countries many people are disoriented by the outcome of events, finding it difficult to understand how a nation with a Christian and democratic tradition could freely choose the leadership of a declared Marxist.

It was in May, 1974, at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations, that a majority of the nations of the world, overriding Western objections, passed a resolution that called for the establishment of a New International Economic Order. This resolution put on a new plane the issues raised in 1964 at the first session of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development when Raul Prebisch, the UNCTAD secretary general, had called in his opening speech for a new international order.

Since 1974 a number of conferences and discussions have been held about how to implement the new order. In 1975, in the wake of a memorable speech read by then U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan that reflected a more conciliatory posture by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.N. Seventh Special Session passed a revised declaration.

After centuries of discussions and disputes over the church-state relationship, it would seem that there is little to say about the “Christian and politics.” The reality is that the relationship is more disputed today than it has ever been. Nor has the theology of the secular, so extensively developed over the past few years, increased the area of agreement about the perspective from which the Christian should look at the political order, how he can speak to it and to what extfent the emphasis should be placed on “Christian” or on “politics.”

There have been few political systems in man's history which have not appealed to God in one way or another for their justification or foundation or mission.

With the publication of Hans J. Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics more than two decades ago, one might have thought that the dragon of creeping scientism would have been laid to rest by now. But Scientific Man, self-confident and potentialiy omnipotent, dies hard.

Last December, for example, Donald F. Horning, President Johnson's science advisor, urged the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Science with a starting budget of at least $2 billion. He was referring, of course, to the physical or “hard” sciences. On the “soft” side, President Johnson reportedly had privately criticized the “kooks and sociologists” who'used the War on Poverty as a living laboratory for their research experiments. I don't know if Mr. Johnson said this, but as a “soft” scientist, I kind of wish he had.

Towards the end of his tenure as president of Sarah Lawrence College Harold Taylor attacked “the present system of lectures textbooks survey courses standard requirements of subject matter examinations md grades” for failing “to touch the inner consciousness of the student or to dtil with his motivations his emotions his aims ind his needs.” It was a typical call for relevance in education.

What I want to do is examine some of the puzzles and hidden assumptions that attach to the relevance-in-education controversy, We need not raise such misty questions is What is the relevance of relevance? (although this is sometimes done) But it does seem imperative to begin with the basic question: Relevant to what? Taylor's answer to that question would appear clear enough.

The recent uprisings in Iran took the world in general and the United States in particular completely by surprise. Indeed, the shah himself and his government were caught off guard. He had stated repeatedly in his frequent interviews with foreign reporters that there was a close bond between him and the people of Iran, that he was like a father to them, and that he loved them and they loved him.

If he actually believed this, then he must have been shocked to witness a grass roots revolt, the like of which had not been seen in the history of Iran.

Americans are no longer so sure as they once were about what is meant by “the free world.” As Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us when he came in out of the cold, however, the distinction between free and unfree is not entirely obscured. Though he does not like everything he sees in the democratic nations, he immediately experienced the differences in the quality of freedom. There are discernible differences that make it possible to speak of “free,” “partially free,” and “not free” nations. Every nation is’ in fact marked by a “mix” of civil and political liberties granted, threatened, or withheld from its citizens. The obvious pitfall for the serious analyst of freedom is to weave complex criteria into a simplistic scheme by which one country is pronounced “free” and another “not free.” The determination of who is and who is not free is more complicated than that. A serious survey of freedom is a matter of weighing each nation against the scales of freedom in other nations. When it comes to human freedom] no nation has finally “arrived.” “Comparative” is the key word.