After witnessing ten years of carnage in Vietnam and the defeat of George McGovem who promised a moral (as opposed to an "honorable") way out of the war, the moral-religious community is left in the lurch. Too idealistic to give up and too realistic to do without results, we are in for some deep analysis of our ethical foundations.

I believe our problem is not that the churches have been involved,in too much politics, requiring of us now a return to evangelism or group encounter. Rather, we have been involved in too much of the wrong kind of politics. Whether Democratic or Republican, we have accepted the politics of Realism as the only way. If the Episcopal Church is "the Republican Party in prayer," the rest of the liberal church community may well be regarded as the Democratic Party in caucus.

Liberal Christian activists have been accused of making politics Lord and the cure for the ills of the world. And by some of their near friends, too. In Up to Our Steeples in Politics (Paramus, New Jersey, 1970) Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway, publisher and editor of Katellagete and leaders of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, have questioned the gospel of relevance-and-realism. In approaching Evangelicals condescendingly, they argued, we have forgotten that the basic notion of these Christians is what we want persons to be—new men and women in Christ. To the question what should the people of today do, Campbell and Holloway answer, “Nothing.” And to the question what should people be, they respond in an evangelical way: “What you are—reconciled, to God and man.“

Last summer in Israel Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli I Ambassador to Washington, suggested that Richard Nixon was the best friend Israel ever had in the White House. Upon his return to Washington before the November election the Ambassador explained that he had not endorsed Richard Nixon's candidacy, and he reaffirmed his country's neutrality in the Presidential election. Despite such assertions, many Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, interpreted Rabin's earlier statement as a Nixon endorsement by Israel. Six months later it is possible to assess the controversy with greater care.

An idealistic reformer in western Sicily, Danilo Dold, has for two decades employed demonstrations, court cases, petitions, fasts and clandestine radio in an imaginative series of nonviolent tactics aimed at feeding and housing the poor. He has also been key to the building of a dam, the opening of a medical clinic and the creation of a new school for Sicilian youth. He has effectively challenged the violence, poverty and fatalism that have ruled western Sicily for three centuries, and has won the reputation of being "the Gandhi of Sicily." Dolci preaches and practices nonviolence in an area that, until most recently, has been the heartland of the Sicilian Mafia. It is a territory that typifies the brutal realities and awesome problems of the entire Italian South, the Mezzogiorno. Dolci dares to envision a new Sicily, a Sicily which by its democracy and economic development would be the envy not only of the underdeveloped world but of many in Western Europe and America.

Quo Vadis Latin America?" is a question that disturbs many people, since nowhere else in the world do there exist so many revolutionary tensions. In order to reply to the question and to exercise influence on the future it is necessary to ask first: "Where do you come from, Latin America?" For the reality of each people is its present, plus the historical context from which it emerges. It is a history four hundred years old, made up of light and shadows, of some spectacular achievements in the past and, of disastrous failures. But it is now tense with expectations because the frustration these failures have bred announce dawn rather than twilight.

The sudden death of Carnal Abdel Nasser sent a seismic shock across Egypt and the entire Arab world," wrote an observer in Cairo at the time. He reported that the streets and byways of the city were quickly transformed into torrents of bewildered and hysterical humanity voicing their shock and grief in spontaneous couplets of crude verse. "O Gamal, O Light of the Eye—you have left us, why, O why?" "O Numeri, O Quadafi—Abdel Nasser has left us and vanished away!" Most surprising (since Muslims do not lightly parody their creed) was the cry, "There is no God but God—and Abdel Nasser is the Beloved of God."

For over a decade the controversy surrounding American private investment in South Africa has failed to penetrate a basic national ambiguity. That ambiguity is viewed by one side of the controversy as plain hypocrisy in the face of racial wrong, and by the other as pragmatism before unclear moral alternatives.

Far from clarifying matters, the ongoing debate has resulted in a constant shift in emphasis and sometimes in position. Many who once called for a complete withdrawal of in vestment now advocate it if it can be shown to promote the welfare of South African blacks. At the same time, strong advocates of withdrawal have won new adherents from active political groups.

After the paris peace conference formalized the end of american military intervention in indochina, the normal expectation would be for the united states to turn to the work of reconstruction, at home and abroad, and to the longer-range task of peace. It is in fact committed to helping repair the damage it has done in indochina; but, as we enter the second development decade in the united nations program, there is need for a much greater american contribution to the developing nations in the years ahead.

Pacifists are sometimes taken seriously, but pacifism rarely. I mean pacifism as a coherent intellectual and social-ethical position. The theologians of liberation and revolution, for example, are extremely critical of ethical Realism, yet they continue to accept Realism's rejection of pacifism. The dogmatic assumption that Niebuhr's arguments against pacifism were and are decisive has almost precluded serious intellectual attention to pacifism. Our socialethical reflection and options are the poorer because of this lack. John Howard Yoder, however, has formulated a pacifist position that provides a rationale and form for a Christian social ethic that actively engages the world. Yoder's highly creative work should stimulate a renewed interest in this traditional option.

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.

The momentum of East-West detente has grown with the summer visit of the agreeable and businesslike Leonid Brezhnev. A burst of treaties, agreements and deals has noisily signaled a singular achievement of Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy. To most Americans the sole objections, raised by Senator Jackson and others in the name of Soviet Jews and liberal dissenters, must seem unwelcome throwbacks of the cold war or at least a parochial intrusion. With world peace and free trade seemingly at stake, even many intellectuals hesitate to belabor the narrowing liberties of those dissident groups.

Both Nixon and Brezhnev agree that trade and arms reductions are practical. While neither disavows ideological competition, both now say it should be channeled to peaceful outlets.

Ghana is a warm and passionate country where people are not ashamed of emotions. Three outbursts, very emotional and very different, marked his passage. On March 6, 1957, everyone turned out in their Sunday best, prim and neat, the children lined up before their parents for the ceremony making their colony the first to attain independence in Black Africa. The British flag was lowered, that of Ghana raised. All eyes turned toward the man who had worked this great change and would now lead them toward the promise. On February 24, 1966, after the shooting stopped, hastily organized and often spontaneous demonstrations began.

Among Protestants in Northern Ireland, especially Presbyterians, there is a stronger tradition of individual clerics involved in politics than among Catholics. The tradition is traced over the last hundred years by Andrew Boyd in his Holy War in Belfast and is represented today by, for example, Ian Paisley and the Reverend Martin Smyth, head of the Orange Order, vice president of the Unionist Party and an important factor in the "loyalist" opposition to the White Paper. The three major Protestant groups are the Church of Ireland, which is in communion with the Church of England, the Presbyterians and the Methodists.

Nineteen seventy-three, it is said, may long be remembered as a momentous turning point for American Christianity. Some are even talking about the possibility of a Third Great Awakening. Key 73 is certainly raising expectations, but the presuppositions underlying Key 73 may be more vulnerable than its promoters now realize.

Key 73 might be described as a Christian blitz. It' is an all-out attempt to evangelize America in 1973 by capitalizing on the strengths of a coordinated thrust. Five years ago an editorial in Christianity Today entreated all evangelicals: “Somehow, Let's Get Together.” In his own words, Dr. Carl F. H. Henry; then editor of the biweekly, observed: “The response was immediate and impressive; few editorials in a decade had stimulated more letters.”

Is the Cuban revolution "good"? The answer to that question does not depend on "facts" alone. It depends also on the meaning we attach to the facts and on our willingness to emphasize one value at the expense of another. We make these choices, these decisions, in our daily lives. Revolutions, in this sense, are no diiferent. What is different is that they highlight the significance of choices made, and they increase the stakes of our political choices. One way to view a revolution is as an investment in politics in order to transform the weight and the meaning of large chunks of our nonpolitical lives, to change the choices we make, our way of making them and their significance.

Russians are now one of the national minorities of the USSR. In 1969 or 1970 the non-Russian birthrate, together with a fillip of immigration of Muslims across the Sinkiang border, finally tipped the balance, and the Great Russians became, not the majority nationality, but the plurality nationality with less than 50 per cent of the population. In statistical terms, at least, the problem of nationalities within the USSR, far from being solved, has become more acute. To, be sure, the Russians are still the leaders in the population statistics and, of greater importance, they seem to maintain absolute command of the economy, all the while their culture is growing more and more dominant.

The strawberry plant is a stemless, rosaceous herb of the genus Fragaria. The confectioner has a multitude of uses for its fruit, from ice cream toppings to pastry fillings. But in addition to the interest its fruit adds to ouixliet, the strawberry plant is currently making a most improbable social impact: It forms the basis of a program of fundamental socioeconomic reform in Guatemala's central highlands.

The story of the role of the strawberry in bringing about basic social change and the practical and theoretical implications of the program of which it is an integral part begins with my father, Carl H. Jacob, a former college professor from southeastern Idaho and a Fulbright lecturer at the national university of El Salvador.

African theology has become a common commodity for discussion in the past five years or so. Increasingly, one get requests to write an article on African theology; and one meets people who jump up with the request, "Oh, tell me something about African theology," or the question, "What is African theology?" for which they expect a three-minute definitive answer. There are also people who do not feel comfortable when the term "African theology" is used. At the other end of the scale are people who get highly excited about the African theology, as though it promised to bring the Kingdom of Heaven finally to this earth.

There is clearly a wide spectrum of popular expectations about African theology. But a lot of them seem to be very shallow, and founded :on wrong or naive assumptions.