In 1967 the American Christian community was criticized for its lack of support for Israel during those terrible weeks of dread when the publicly threatened Arab invasion of Israel drew closer with each passing day. But in 1973 it was different. This time there was no long period of escalating warlike actions coming from Israel's Arab neighbors. Instead, Egypt and Syria shattered the internationally sanctioned ceasefire by commencing full-scale armed hostilities on Judaism's holiest day, Yom Kippur. Almost immediately many American Christians reacted in shock and outrage. Dr. Robert Campbell, the general secretary of the American Baptist Churches, said: “The attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria as reported by our government and the United Nations observation group was a violation of international law and a threat to the right of Israel to exist as a state.” Some Christians condemned the Arab attack as a “travesty,” a “profanation” and a “criminal act of war.”

I hate all violence, but most intensely I hate the violence inflicted by an all-powerful establishment on a helpless individual. The thought of a man or woman alone in a secret cell facing the fiendish horrors of ingenious and remorseless torture is utterly revolting. I can think of no evil to equal it. It should by now be a crime completely outlawed, but instead it spreads like an epidemic disease.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news that in Christ God has broken down the walls of division between God and man, and therefore also between man and man.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ declares that Christ is the truth who sets men free from all false hopes of grasping freedom for themselves, and that Christ liberates them from a pursuit of false securities.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ declares that, in the crucifixion of Jesus, sin has been forgiven, and that God has met and mastered the forces that threaten to isolate man and destroy him.

The question-title of this article contains two implicit assumptions that I find thoroughly embarrassing. The first is that secularization is some inevitable process gradually” reaching out to the far corners of the Western world. The second is that Scotland is, frankly, a backwater; secularization has reached almost everywhere else, and now is about to reach this last bastion of the old order. Very soon the fate of old-style religion will be sealed, and secularization will have achieved its final victory somewhere in the wild mountains of the Scottish Highlands.

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.

At a recent meeting of the editors of Worldview Richard Neuhaus enlivened the proceedings by another one of his acutely perspicacious political opinions. He opined that the White House appointment of General Haig proves that the United States is adopting the Peruvian military model of development. He is wrong. The true import of the Watergate affair is more sinister: The government of the United States is being taken over by multinational corporations under the control of the West German tourist industry.

Any observer schooled in New Left methods of analysis should, of course, have suspected something like this from the beginning. Why alt these Germans? Only bourgeois social scientists can be satisfied with an explanation in terms of a Novaldan resurgence of ethnic genius.

Modern physicists have penetrated far beyond vision into an ultimate pantheon of mesons and muons and other demiurges of matter. We have managed to turn their poetic penetration into the physical threats of Three Mile Island and a nuclear arms race. American statesmen after World War II, with uncommon and far-reaching vision, set about restoring a devastated world. The world they produced, a world of free, interdependent, and disputatious nations, seems to many Americans and myopic political leaders a source of embarrassment rather than the fruit of our own farsighted statesmanship.