There is no such thing as a typical Asian or Oriental .mind any more than there is a typical Western mind. The phrase is only a shorthand way of stating that, if we wish to understand a people, we must take seriously the internal dimension of mind and feeling as well as external factors such as pontics, economics, kinship and social structures, diplomatic relations and military affairs. We are all what we are—psycho-physical-spiritual beings—mortals endowed with memory, intelligence and sexuality, trying to make some sense out of our transitory existence in this mysterious universe. Yet different cultural traditions have developed their own characteristic way of apprehending the meaning of life, nurtured and preserved by respective languages, customs, myths and religions.

When it comes to discussing such a broad and highly speculative subject as the future of the international trade and payments system, I feel like the scholar who one day discovered that Christopher Columbus had set sail for America with four ships. Of course his astonished colleagues demanded an explanation for what had happened to the hitherto unknown fourth ship. The scholar replied that it had gone over the edge. In peering over the precipice at which the international economic system now lies, there is considerable danger of judging how the system is doing rather than what it is doing, or of projecting one's convictions about how it should operate in the future directly into a forecast. I shall try to avoid these traps.

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.

On the medieval porch of the Haram-el-Ibrahimi, the great mosque of Hebron whose proud and massive walls are a monument from Herodian rimes, three Israeli soldiers stand guard. Leaning nonchalantly on their machine guns, they scrutinize the visitors, courteously asking them to put on the head covering that is strictly required in synagogues. As one climbs the long stone staircase toward the entrance of the mosque the sound of a Jewish liturgical chant, at first faint and indistinct, grows louder until it becomes deafening.

About a hundred faithful, many of them soldiers in uniform with their heads capped with yarmulkes, stand and shake to and fro before the candlelit Torah fervently celebrating their office. For the first time in fourteen centuries Jews are able to worship in the building that contains the "Tombs of the Patriarchs" Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a site sacred to both Muslim and Jew.

It is not too soon for some firm judgments to be made regarding what has just transpired in Chile. We can consider not only some of the more important current causes for the bloody coup but some contributing events from the past. Some rough idea as to what we can expect from the present military regime—that is, the military dictatorship— will emerge from the examination.

How ironic that we use that ugly word “dictatorship“ to describe an institution that but a few weeks ago was winning praises as a model of an armed service that, recognized the doctrine of civilian supremacy, the chain of command, and was in itself— ostensibly to the end of the Allende Administration— the architrave of Chilean constitutionalism.

Journalists, historians, sociologists and religious leaders are all agreed that the American churches are badly split. The division is partly theological, but it recognizes no traditional bounds of denomination, afflicting Roman Catholics as much as the various Protestants. The thesis of Dean Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Crowing, (New York, 1972) is suggested by the title he himself had chosen for the book: “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” Churches that are ecumenical in spirit and open to the wider world do not prosper like those that are highly authoritarian and exclusivistic. Strict authoritarianism responds to the desire for secure foundations in a badly shaken culture.

Half a decade after the Six-Day War the Israeli government has made no decision about the future of the West Bank. The elections held in the West Bank's towns in early 1972, but under Jordanian law, were one example of the Jerusalem cabinet's inability to come to any decision and its determination to postpone decision for as long as possible. This determination reflects the complexity of the problem per se and the deep divisions within the Israeli polity on this subject. We will focus on the internal Israeli aspect.

Elders raised their eyebrows and young people cheered when Rabbi Earl Vinecour, twenty-eight years old, a former captain in the U.S. Army, advocated the introduction of rock music into the synagogue service. In Cape Town, in the year 1970, such an idea seemed novel and audacious. But emotions ran much higher, still when the local Reform temple's new assistant rabbi and educational director began to probe the morality of racism. His talk on "Judaism and Apartheid" before the Students' Jewish Association at Cape Town University—in which he referred to similarities between the Nazi Nuremberg laws and current South African racial legislation—aroused alarm and wrath among many members of his own congregation.

Until a few years ago it was dogma for most of us that Marxism was the negation of the most central values of the Christian faith. Faith believes in God. It faces history as an open process which can be invaded by the unexpected. Marxism, on the contrary, is radically atheistic. It takes the material components of life as the only ones to determine the future of mankind.

It is the night before another antiwar demonstration and a half a dozen students—long-haired, bearded, blue-jeaned and sandaled— are painting placards and writing propaganda in one of the rooms of the student hall of Doshisha University. In a few hours they will board a slow train to Tokyo (they do not have enough money for the shinkansen, or bullet) and will join thousands of their contemporaries in a carefully orchestrated melee ardund one of the large stations, probably Shinjuku, favorite haunt of the young and the mod. It will not be a major demonstration resulting in mass arrests and injuries. It will barely delay trains and blockade traffic for two or three hours—enough for page one of the national papers, enough to remind everyone that radical youth is not entirely dead, enough for middle-class, nonviolent Japan to recall with shrugs of remorse and distaste the bloody excesses of the past year.

Since the emergence of negritude as a literary and philosophical creed, debates have been raging among African and black intellectuals both inside and outside the continent as to the real nature of the "true" art and culture of Africa. Some of these debates ignore history and the contact made between Africa and other parts of the world. The followers of the nationalist position hold that any Europeanism in Africa's culture is untenable and tantamount to betrayal and cultural heresy.

When a Scotsman wears a kilt, or a Frenchman sings the Marseillaise, it seems reasonable to put it all down to strong nationalist feeling. Scotland and France are among the oldest nations in Europe, and most people can recognize instantly the symbols and characteristics that are associated with them because they are so often manifested.

But what does nationalist feeling amount to in Europe today, in political and social terms? Is Europe not at the end of the "era of nationalism" and at the start of an era of supranational unity? The European Economic Community has been enlarged this year with the addition of Britain, Ireland and Denmark, and it is possible to look forward to a sort of federal "United States of Europe" within the next couple of decades.

In the year 1948 Israel became a state and I became stateless. For the next twentyfive years Israelis were building a nation and I was inhabiting a world of nothingness in which I experienced no halcyon period, no moment when my very essence as a man was not negated and my very rights as a human being were not dismissed. In 1948 the world applauded the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. I was a Palestinian, and the Jewish homeland was being established in my country, at the cost of displacing me and creating in us all a nation in exile.

A conversation between Richard Shaull who wrote Containment and Change at the beginning of 1966 and the Dick Shaull who is trying to find his way in the confusing situation at the end of 1972.

In 1834 the French priest Félicité de Larnmenais wrote Paroles dun Croyant, in which he asserted that it would not be a nation or a Icing or a church that would bear the future destiny of mankind but "the people." Lammenais and the L'Avenir group in Paris had appealed in 1831 to Pope Gregory XVI, advocating that the Catholic Church abandon its traditional alliance with the thrones of Europe to align itself with and become the champion of the freedom of the people; In the encyclical Mirari Vos Gregory XVI repudiated Lammenais's appeal and reaffirmed the mutually reinforcing relationship between the true religion and established political power as the one guarantee against "an ever-approaching resolution-abyss of bottomless miseries."

In the long perspective of the economic life of the American community, the four years of the First Nixon Administration belong to the middle range of achievement. When the noise and smoke of these years will have passed away, their prizes having been engrossed and their pains dulled in forgetfulness, men of resigned or complacent disposition will call this Normal. Others, less acquiescent or more aspiring, will call it Mediocre.

small Alpine village in the shadow of mountains that have watched impassively the coming of industrial society. A remarkable study in contrasts. A massive peasant house built in the sixteenth century across the street from a completely automated milk-processing center. Smooth machines now handle a host of functions that were once the work of the peasant family across the way. A swaying cable car carries foreign tourists up over common land that the village is no longer populous enough to cultivate. A young girl can be seen haying on the side of an Alpine meadow worked by her ancestors, but she is wearing a miniskirt and rib sweater, and she is soon on her way to a big-city salesgirl apprenticeship.

I am going to argue for two major theses which seek to relate Buddhism to the processes of social and political change. The second thesis also relates the processes of social and political change to each other, a very important linkage in view of the prevailing assumption that government is the major initiator and director of social change.