The subject carries all the taboos of incest. Easier, by far, to get someone to suggest that Henry Kissinger smokes pot with President Nixon than that Rene Levesque might be received for coffee by the Canadian desk officer. That was how Washington journalist Milton Viorst described his experience when he tried to discuss French-Canadian problems with American State Department officials three years ago.

As Viorst predicted, not much has changed: “Washington is likely to keep tiptoeing around, feigning delicately that the separatist movement in Quebec doesn't really exist.”

My comments focus primarily on Harvey Cox's criticisms of the Hartford document, since his comments touch on the major areas in which the document has been criticized. One area has to do wim aesthetic concerns in relation to the style and tone of the affirmation. Cox is especially blunt on these matters, using such words as “flaccid,” “dull,” “bland,” “cliched,” and “provincial.” There is little to say in response to such charges. Professor John Wisdom once suggested mat all philosophical theses are either true and trivial or false and illuminating; perhaps some simitar principle operates in meology.

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.

Except for the diatribe by the panreligious secular citizen Harvey Cox, the critiques of the Hartford Appeal published in the May issue of Worldview seemed to me constructive and tended to move the discussion ahead. Unfortunately, Cox's response appeared simply to be a wild exaggeration. To recall Torquemada, the Index, and the Scopes trial because some people have taken a dim view of the theological mishmash hawked by the mod-theologians and so dramatically exemplified by Cox's The Seduction of the Spirit seems a little extreme. Even a modtheologian should not expect constant adulation. But the other writers seemed to raise some important issues.