The American crisis in values and meanings has led many to look for a locale where common beliefs; and behavior patterns can be engendered, appraised and nurtured. Words like “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” “Energy-versus-Ecology” codify complex issues for debate. Yet a nation with a troubled soul does not know where to take up the issues. Religious organizations and voluntary associations abound, but, it is argued, they are too private and particular. The nation seems to be the only available matrix and repository of common values. “One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand,” said the poet William Butler Yeats. “That glove is one's nation, the only thing one knows even a little of.”

After almost a generation of cold war and bipolarity the international situation is said to have been transformed. We have entered the postwar era at last, an age characterized by multipolarity and the sober pursuit of national interests. America, Russia and China are assumed to have at last abandoned their crusading approach to world affairs. In the Moscow, Shanghai and San Clemente communiqués issued after Summit conferences in 1972 and 1973 these great nations “took the pledge” to exercise restraint, moderation and similar virtues. A war- and world-weary United States eagerly embraces a lower profile abroad, gratefully bidding goodbye to thirty years of globalism.

So you think America had a troubled winter? Striking truckers, gasoline shortages and long lines at the pumps, food prices up 30 per cent and a President in deeper trouble than any President since Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover.

But suppose your constitution was only a year and a half old and your political system seemed to depend mainly on the art of one adroit and very energetic man. Or that the political coalition which alone could provide some inclusive national direction was eroding, leaving only splintered, regional parties as a plausible alternative. Or that economic resources were becoming so scarce that wherever policy-makers turned they found a nearly empty barrel.

In light of the recent war between Israel and Egypt and Syria and the uneasy cease-fire which now prevails, it is entirely natural to inquire whether Resolution 242 of the United Nations Security Council, adopted on November 22, 1967, following the Six-Day War, remains operative.

In a lecture delivered at Chatham House on April 6, 1971, and in an article published in a recent issue of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, I stated my conviction that Resolution 242 may ultimately prove to be the basis for a peace settlement in the Middle East. I adhere to this view, despite the recent hostilities still smoldering.

There is an important new development which reaffirms my conviction that the guidelines set forth in Resolution 242 are still relevant. That development is the resolution of the Security Council sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union–Resolution 338, adopted on October 22, 1973–calling for a cease-fire in the early hours of the morning of the following day.

Since Vatican Council II issued its Decree on Ecumenism, the rapprochement between churches has moved many a step forward. To be sure, one no longer finds the enthusiasm of the 1960's, but the dialogues between churches have gained in depth and seriousness what they have lost in facility and popularity. Again, the statements issued by the Lutheran-Catholic Conversations in America (on The Eucharist as Sacrifice, 1967; Eucharist and Ministry, 1970), or by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Conversations (Windsor Statement on the Eucharist, December, 1971; Canterbury Statement on Ministry, December, 1973) may be neither complete nor final; yet they witness to a growing consensus which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. This consensus gives the lie to what had been for years an axiom in one stream of the ecumenical flow: Doctrine divides, service unites. The current ecumenical moment has put this maxim to the test and uncovered its inadequacy. It is not too optimistic to say now that doctrine is in the process of uniting.

Contrary to many optimistic expectations, the relative position of the nonwhite in the Republic of South Africa has not improved over the past several decades. To lay observers the existence of a state committed to racial exclusion and oppression seems an anachronism in our age of modernity. There is a naive belief that explicit racism is somewhere incompatible with futuristic office buildings, double-knit business suits, teaching machines or a degree in sociology. Yet these and other trappings of the modern age coexist in South Africa with absolute racial division.