The assassination of Amίlcar Cabral in January, 1973, was reported in the American news media, but there was no follow-up, and few Americans recognize Cabral's name, or even the name of Portuguese Guinea, the small colony he had hoped to lead to independence.

From a geographical point of view the obscprity of Portuguese Guinea might seem well deserved. Wedged between Senegal and the independent Republic of Guinea, it is about 40 per cent the size of Portugal, but its population is less than that of the city of Lisbon. Mostly hot and humid, much of the colony is covered by bayous and salt-water swamps. The people, who until recently were about 99 per cent illiterate, are divided into a number of traditionally antagonistic groups that are religiously, culturally and linguistically distinct.

In the last year and a half the familiar stereotype of the faithful Indian companion silently marching alongside the white hero à la Tonto has been rudely shaken. First a group of Sioux Indians invaded a sleepy Nebraska town where one of their kinsmen had been brutally murdered and demanded justice. Then there was the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters during the week of the 1972 national elections and the almost total destruction of that building. Tempers had hardly cooled by the end of 1972 when the same group of Indian activists invaded Custer, South Dakota, burned a stall-like Chamber of Commerce building and scared the settlers who had moved into the Black Hills, winding up their confrontation with the destruction; of several bars in Rapid City, South Dakota.

In 1967 the American Christian community was criticized for its lack of support for Israel during those terrible weeks of dread when the publicly threatened Arab invasion of Israel drew closer with each passing day. But in 1973 it was different. This time there was no long period of escalating warlike actions coming from Israel's Arab neighbors. Instead, Egypt and Syria shattered the internationally sanctioned ceasefire by commencing full-scale armed hostilities on Judaism's holiest day, Yom Kippur. Almost immediately many American Christians reacted in shock and outrage. Dr. Robert Campbell, the general secretary of the American Baptist Churches, said: “The attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria as reported by our government and the United Nations observation group was a violation of international law and a threat to the right of Israel to exist as a state.” Some Christians condemned the Arab attack as a “travesty,” a “profanation” and a “criminal act of war.”

The recent Middle East armed conflict has been a paramount occasion for many American Catholics and Jews to realize that their dialogue, begun in the early sixties, was at an end. That conflict did not end the dialogue; but the dialogue, such as it was envisaged by its initiators, had in fact ended sometime between the June, 1967, Six-Day War and the November, 1973, ceasefire.

The reasons for its end now appear obvious: the primary aims entertained by both Catholics and Jews were achieved; and, quite importantly, the chief participants in that dialogue—Catholics, their Church, American Jews and Israel—all had undergone an evolution. They are no longer what they were in 1960.

The response on the part of Christians to the ongoing struggle in the Middle East between Israel and the Arab states is limited, restrained and varied. This should not have surprised anyone, for in general Christians do not differ from the great mass of those who make up our nation. We are a people quite generally uninformed about international affairs and not very quickly stirred up by happenings abroad. Some of us are moved by such things, but it takes a Pearl Harbor or a halfdozen years of rapidly accelerating U.S. aggression in Indochina to get a response from us. The average Jew has every reason to be concerned about the breaking of the peace in the Middle East.

The appearance of John Yoder's exegetical defense of pacifism, The Politics of Jesus, has reopened the question of the relationship between violence and religious values (cf. Stanley Hauerwas's “Messianic Pacifism,” Worldview, June, 1973). Even those who have carefully and decisively rejected the pacifist option will be disturbed once more by this magistral summation of the New Testament tradition. The source of this unease will be Yoder's informed and dispassionate examination of the question: What is the significance of Jesus' death for the contemporary Christian? His reminder that the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus constitute the form of Christian existence is persuasive in its very simplicity. He argues, principally on the basis of St. Luke's Gospel, but with corroboration from virtually all the New Testament writings, that a life unscarred by defeat cannot be called Christian. There can be no following of Jesus that does not go by way of the cross, nor any hope that resurrection will occur outside a tomb. Starkly, Yoder calls us back to the basics, asking: What is the cross in your political life?

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.

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.

Jerusalem—Nov. 9. On Israel's statesponsored radio network, her only one, the hourly news is preceded by four high-pitched beeps easily heard above the noise of a crowd. In stores customers gather around the nearest transistor like metal filings around the poles of a magnet, in buses the pushing stops and the driver turns up the volume, in cafés the murmur of talk subsides altogether. Israel becomes one vast ear straining to catch the nuances of the latest twist in the international situation. The news is over and the volume turned down, then discussion begins again: What did Golda really accomplish on her last trip abroad? How far are the Soviets willing to go? What did Sadat's latest statement mean and at whom was it really aimed? Here everyone is an analyst and everyone a strategist.

Early in Gordon Zahn's “War and Its Conventions” (Worldview, July, 1973) the author sets forth the proposal that “the Vietnam conflict be taken as a test case by writers who would persist in the illusion that just war standards and conditions are, or indeed could be, taken into account in the policy decisions reached by military leaders and magistrates.” By the end of this same article Zahn has moved on to the more startling proposal that an international tribunal of “theologians and other specialists in religion and in the presumed influence religion has upon the affairs of man” be convoked to render judgment on the morality of the Vietnam war. Since these two propositions have no necessary direct relationship, and since in the pages separating them Zahn does not connect them, one is left wondering just what Zahn intends to say in this article.