In July, 1974, Spain finally stood at the threshold of the momentous political transition that many had hoped for and just as many had feared for at least thirty years. An attack of phlebitis placed the life of the eighty-one-year-old Generalissimo Francisco Franco in grave danger and forced him, for the first time, to relinquish the powers of chief of state, which were temporarily transferred to his chosen successor, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon, who will presumably soon become king of Spain, in any event.

We have been waging a battle to improve the quality of life in the developing world for twenty-five years. Today this battle is being lost. As the world's military powers seek to reduce the risks of nuclear holocaust, new dangers to political and economic stability have arisen.

The threat of widespread famine is on the increase. Fertilizer shortages grow, and the affluent continue to consume a disproportionate amount of the world's food resources. Worldwide inflation continues to take a heavy toll on the developing and the developed countries alike. This erodes political stability and depletes what little hard currency the poor nations have amassed.

Italy's thirty-sixth government since 1944 resigned on June 10, 1974. On June 14 the Italian President, Giovanni Leone, who must accept such resignations, refused to accept this one. The resigned Rumor Fifth Government had to reform and carry on. The Rumor government was the shortest of all previous governments (eighty-nine days), and its resignation came at what seemed a time of deepest crisis. Leone probably made his unprecedented move because little other alternative existed and the crisis would not wait. The Italian President is charged with consulting and arranging new governmental coalitions, which must receive thence a majority support in parliament to survive. If this is impossible, new elections must be called. For the moment the continued Rumor government is a hopeful interim, but much depends on the Socialist Party and the way it views the current crisis.

The resistance of those who persist in maintaining old ways of thinking theologically and their accusations that the faith is being distorted are reminiscent of the opposition to the use of Aristotelian philosophy in theology. Notwithstanding the unfounded alarms and episodic condemnations these protests might provoke in the present, they, like their predecessors, have no future.

The future is in the hands of a faith which has no fear of the advances in thought and no fear of the social practice of man, a faith which allows itself to be interrogated by these phenomena, but also challenges them, a faith which is enriched but does not submit acritically.

To say that this is now Dr. Kissinger's world is more or less indisputable. But to say that his world includes the whole of the globe is inaccurate, In all Africa below the Mediterranean fringe there is not one leader who can refer to “our friend Henry.” As Dr. Kissinger admitted in his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, he had, after a quarter century as one of our leading academic authorities on foreign policy, not yet formulated any “philosophy” of African-American relations. He spoke vaguely of calling some of our ambassadors to Africa back to Washington “to give me their judgment on what the best U.S. philosophy should be in that area.”

Military planners, security-minded intellectuals and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger himself have been reexamining current nuclear strategy in light of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. As always, caution and skepticism are advisable in appraising new proposals for military strategy and even for arms control, since such proposals often encourage the arms race to continue unabated in new, more volatile areas.

Because of Schlesinger's public / announced intention to modify American nuclear policy, one strategic proposal receiving attention is Bruce Russett's suggestion, published two years ago in Worldview (“Short of Nuclear Madness,” April, 1972), and in his contribution to The Military-Industrial Complex: A Reassessment, edited by Sam C. Sarkesian and Charles Moskos, that the United States should replace a countercity nuclear strategy with a counter-combatant strategy.

Hillel Levine's “An Open Letter to Father Daniel Berrigan” (Worldview, February) seems to me to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of much of the response to Berrigan's talk from the Jewish community. To have received from a man so identified with Abraham Heschel (and with whom they themselves so identified their own consciences) such a diatribe—which evoked all the traditions by which Christians have appropriated the identity of the Jew to vilify the Jew himself—was a blow to which the Jewish community seems able to formulate only a partly coherent reply. A wound kept raw through a thousand years of pogroms is opened again. There seems to be pain too deep to be translated into clear prose nicely balanced against the political realities of Arab-Israeli conflict.

If it was nothing else the U.N. Special Session on Raw Materials and development, which stirred the East River enclave to an unwonted pitch of springtime activity last April, was a display of Third World solidarity. In spite of the massive balance-of-payments crisis threatening many of the less developed nations — a result of the sudden steep rise in the price of oil plus sharp increases in the prices of food and fertilizer — the atmosphere in the public forums reflected near euphoria because of the oil-producing (OPEC) nations' dramatic success in gaining control of their own natural resources.

One of the most tiresome arguments in international affairs is the “realist” case against world federal government. It has been permitted to prevail for much too long.

For decades “political realists” have asserted that nationalism is too stong and stubborn a force for a world rule of law to be established. They have been all too persuasive—but have contributed thereby to their own self-fulfilling prophecies. “Realists” have typically voiced boredom and condescension toward federalists and have indulged in raw caricatures of the federalist case. The plausibility of such caricatures has been abetted by the fact that too many of the most visible (and audible!) federalists have been senior citizens whose fervent idioms suggest a dreamy one-worldism of an earlier era. It is time to renew and restate the case for world federal government.

Watersheds of human history are often given symbolic recognition through radical breaks in the way we date things. Thus in Christendom reference is made to B.C. and A.D.; some Jews and Christians have agreed on a mutual resort to BCE and C.E.; while in Islam H.A. stands for the alldecisive year of Mohammed's Hijra (Migration). Perhaps 1941 is to be identified as Year One of the Holocaust (basing it upon the “killing phase” of the program against the Jews). On this reckoning the present analysis is offered in the year 34 of the Holocaust. But the symbology A.H. would mean confusion with Muslim usage. An alternative, for English usage, is BFS, before the Final Solution, and F.S., in the year of the Final Solution. (Any symbology faces the criticism of being either arbitrary or contrived. A still further alternative is B.A. and A.A., before and after Auschwitz. There are substantive objections to singling out Auschwitz, and yet there is no doubt that this name has become the single most powerful symbol of the Holocaust.)

A society's culture is a compound of many expressions of value. Each one is an argument, a “position paper” of sorts, or a liturgy to be recited; most of them are subjected to scrutiny and susceptible to change. We are, I hope, changing our American arguments about defending freedom around the world and, closer to home, about the place of the woman, the black, the Chicano or the Indian in our social structures and behaviors.

There is one such expression of value—I call it the Liturgy of the Environment—that is only rarely scrutinized. That means it is rarely criticized, and that means it does not change much.

Waste, as is now well known, has become a cosmic threat. Scientists have warned us that the accumulated product of overpopulation is strangling the environment. Smoky filth darkens the sky, turning the air into lethal gas. The junk of existence piles up, transforming park greens into tin mines. The oil of industry spills death where once there was life.

That this must? be stopped is indisputable. But, until now, no suitable plan has been offered. My modest proposal will cure two of man's greatest ills by ending overpopulation and providing a new source of income for the poor. And, since experts link overcrowding with aggressive behavior, war may even be eliminated.

It is not too early to try and anticipate some of the possible defense strategies that might be used in trials emerging from “Watergate.” Some months ago, in one of those TV appearances, Richard Nixon suggested an excuse by way of comparison with the illegal antiwar demonstrations of the 1960's. Then there was Jeb Stuart Magruder before the Senate Watergate Committee arguing that his former ethics teacher, William Sloane Coffin, had inspired him with the idea that for certain higher reasons a breaking of the law was justified.

Other Watergate defendants have pleaded loyalty to Nixon and the Nixon cause as sufficient justification for their otherwise illegal actions. Notable were John Mitchell's insistence that (almost) anything was justified to prevent “the alternative” candidate from being elected; Patrick Gray asserting that loyalty to Nixon should override his own doubts about what he was asked to do; and Bernard Barker's commitment to the defeat of communism in general and Castroism in particular.

The notion of “the frontier” is a profound one in European and American history. From the Rhine-Danube line of the late Roman Empire, to the eastern medieval German forests, to the Indies beyond the seas, to the New World and the Far West, the frontier has been, as Frederick Jackson Turner once suggested, as much spiritual as geographical in nature. We are a race that has, in a very real sense, been continually shocked out of our cyclic, stability tendencies by ever new horizons, each transcending and revolutionizing our cultural visions and expectations. The early voyages of Diaz, da Gama, Columbus, John Davis and Magellan, along with the later ones of Francis Drake, Abel Tasman and James Cook, were of a piece with Peary's and Amundsen's discoveries of the two Poles, with the search for the Northwest Passage, with Hillary's conquest of Everest and Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon.

The Post-American is committed to radical discipleship.” So begins a descriptive statement about a publication that seeks to serve as a forum for an emerging consciousness. Its message is both old and new—a radical understanding of biblical faith and discipleship. The context of American power and global dominance makes the need for “post-american” vision particularly critical. The publication, first as a tabloid and now as a monthly magazine, has received wide support among people seeking to rediscover the meaning of the Gospel for their lives and their times, people being driven to a new understanding of themselves, their nation and their Christian responsibilities.