The question of justice and war is precisely a question: Can war ever be the task of justice?

Pacifism is one clear response to this question. There are different pacifisms, certainly, but they seem to converge at the point of policy. There is a pacifism which may be called experiential, in the sense that one's reading of the history of armed conflict forces one to conclude that, on balance, war will never produce good fruit. There is another which may be intuitional or deontological, in that one somehow knows, independently of inductive, logical processes, that the life-taking which war is, is intolerable. Both positions yield a general policy posture: War may not be done.

One should not make too much of the fact that Karl Barth and Thomas Merton died on the same day. Barth was an old man, a Doctor of the Church in the highest tradition, and his historic task was surely accomplished. Merton was still “young,” a famous public and troubled seeker after God and man, and no one now will ever know what he might have become. Barth; one supposes, had not read Merton; and Merton, one suspects, had not read deeply in Barth. But the sadness and shock of reading their obituaries together in the New York Times last month brought to mind certain values to which they both bore witness—with whatever differences of temperament, generation and style.

The last days of the old year underlined the painful truth once again — America is the blind giant, its three astronauts circling tlie moon in a dizzying display of technologic expertise, while on earth its diplomats and statesmen played out the bizarre farce attending the release of the Pueblo crewmen from North Korean captivity and simultaneously lapsed into an exchange of invective with the Saigon junta we once hailed as a vehicle for the constitutional salvation of South Vietnam.

The Apollo 8 journey was, of course, wholly admirable—a stunning reversal of America's space fortunes in little more than a decade. What money, organization, application, and no doubt a vast engineering talent can do, the United States has done in space.