The stream begins in a park near the military school on the outskirts of the medieval Saxon-built town of Sibiu. It burbles through grassy meadows and pine forests as nearby roads turn to dirt tracks and dignified nineteenth-century homes yield to occasional thatched huts and sheds. On a sun-dappled Sunday afternoon families play in the park. From time to time lovers vanish down the path, escaping from prying eyes in the rows of gabled houses and shops within a double ring of huge stone walls that were thrown up seven centuries ago to ward off the Tatars. "People here are afraid," says the young woman, a schoolteacher. She is perched on a walkway atop one of the outer walls. Beneath us ancient churches and towers shadow the town's twisting streets. "You don't know our rules."

Russia's Aesop, Ivan Krylov, said: “You can be sure the puppy is strong, because it barks at the elephant.”; The Russian bear is much more powerful than a puppy, but it stands on feet of clay. The United States is not an elephant, but it is by far the world's strongest economic and military force, striking both respect and fear in Soviet leaders, from Lenin through Brezhnev.

The U.S. economy is more than twice the size of the Soviet and much more dynamic. Our strategic arsenal also overshadows Moscow's. According to Defense Secretary Harold Brown, the United States today has nearly 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads aboard our land-and sea-based missiles and bombers, compared to 5,000 for the Soviets. These power realities help explain Kremlin complexes about Moscow's persistent Avis posture in world affairs.

Most Americans concerned for South Africa tend to fault Afrikaans-speaking whites for apartheid and to look with hope toward the English-speakers. As a result, Afrikaners have tended to become isolated, easily written off as stubbornly intransigent in their racism. This habit of mind misrepresents the larger and more powerful group of whites who, given their Christian moralism, may be overlooked as a hidden resource for change. My experiences with a wide variety of South Africans provide reason to suggest a revisionist approach. Some historical background on the two white communities may help the reader to make sense of this suggestion.

With the rapidly increasing interdependence of all people who inhabit the planet Earth, it has become widely accepted that the ways in which a country acts toward its own citizens may also have important consequences for citizens of other countries. More particularly, a state that systematically represses the fundamental rights of its own subjects is apt to be viewed as a potential threat to the peace and security of other states as well. This view is supported by the United Nations Charter, which expressly links the cause of human rights with the cause of world peace.

The Third General Assembly of the Latin American Episcopate took place last February in the Mexican city of Puebla. Without doubt it will make a profound impact upon the evangelizing action of the Church in Latin America. The documents produced at Puebla, like those produced in Medellin ten years earlier, will give rise to reflections that will find their way into the diverse pastoral plans of each nation.

Neither Medellin nor Puebla can be considered isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, each should be seen as fruits of a maturing process in which Christian people, together with their pastors, express both the depths of their anguish and their high hopes and visions. That vision encompasses raising people from subhuman situations to a fuller experience of human life. Such experience should be expected to bring people together in brotherly love and lead naturally to a greater openness to God.

The clay feet of one of the main idols of contemporary international relations have been found and his collapse is awaited. Some observers even go so far as to suggest that the fall of the idol will also bring about the political demise of the land from whose soil he rose and upon which he now rests his laurels.

Mohammed Anwar el-Sadat has a Bebe Rebozotype as a close friend and advisor whose very name has become a kind of “shorthand for corruption.” The president of a republic, he has created around himself the atmosphere of a royal court, an imperial and imperious presidency, and also pays little or no attention to his official advisors. Furthermore, his wife, unlike Nasser's, occasionally transcends the boundaries of convention regarding the- role of a woman and thus offends the sensibilities of Moslem society.

A crucial turning point in geopolitical history occurred on November 1, 1978, when President Carter announced a massive borrowing of foreign currencies to save the U.S. dollar. For the first time since World War II the U.S. was forced to borrow from the International Monetary Fund; and for the first time since 1893 the U.S. Treasury will have to issue bonds denominated in foreign monies—in this case Japanese yen, West German marks, and Swiss francs.

What all this means is that the U.S. has acknowledged two things: that the European Economic Community (the EEC) and Japan are now its economic equals; and that America has forfeited the international economic supremacy it enjoyed since 1915.

The Americans are coming—not merely statesmen and diplomats, not just occasional journalists or teams of scholars or family planners or whatever, but almost anyone with enough money to pay for the privilege and accept some of the nuisance of guided tourism through the People's Republic of China. They jostle for space outside the panda pens of the Peking zoo, madly clicking cameras and shouting greetings at one another. They troop through the courts of the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, mingling with grinning off-duty People's Liberation Army soldiers and hordes of uniformed schoolchildren. They crowd the orchestras of theatres and concert halls, applauding newly revived “revolutionary” operas and dances, often with more spontaneous verve than do the respectfully restrained Chinese around them.

The spectacle of Americans in garish, multicolored dress swirling through the lobbies of Peking's halfdozen hotels for foreigners provides a startling contrast to the normal sight of Ma9-suited Chinese bicycling methodically along broad avenues or crowding sidewalks through districts in which tourists until this year were distinct rareties. The Fifth National People's Congress was in full swing in early March when the first batches of American “friends” with no special professional or political affiliations began arriving. By the end of December some fifteen thousand of them had made the tour—a minuscule figure by the standards of virtually any other nation, but a great leap from the tojal of three thousand American visitors in 1977.

On September 2, 1945, the Vietnamese Communists raised their red flag in Hanoi to proclaim the independent Republic of Vietnam. The group that saluted the flag included the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and American officers in uniform.

On April 30, 1975, the last helicopter of an evacuation airlift rose from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. As the Americans fled Saigon, forces of the North Vietnam Army entered the city and renamed it Ho Chi Minh. South Vietnam ceased to exist as a separate state; the last official vestiges of American participation in a disastrous, losing war disappeared; and the Communists of North Vietnam consolidated their control over the entire country.

Appearing on the balcony of St. Peter's, his first words as supreme pontiff were: “May Jesus Christ be praised!” At the close of the installation eucharist John Paul II lifted high the papal crozier, redesigned by Pope Paul as a staff surmounted by the crucified Christ. In all his utterances to date the new pope has emphasized Christ as the hope of the world but has also lifted up the mankind Christ came to save. He has illuminated the variousness of this mankind, from the individual in all his loneliness, even his alienation, to persons in collectivities of family, class, race, and nation. He has described many Christians too as people often filled with doubt about their ultimate meaning to themselves or for others, both on the level of social relations of all kinds and in the redemptive community of the Church. John Paul closed his installation homily: “I appeal to all men—to every man (and with what veneration the apostle of Christ must utter this word, ‘man’)—pray for me.“

Some days later John Paul visited Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and declared that he dedicated his pontificate to the Dominican tertiary St. Catherine of Siena (d. 1380). This was one further gesture of his identification with the Italian people as their national primate, for St. Catherine and St. Francis of Assisi are the two patron saints of Italy. But he was also signaling his intention, in his choice of a lay woman, a reformer, a crusader, a mystic, and a doctor of the Church (so proclaimed in 1970), to assign high positions of decisionmaking to lay women and to female religious of all orders in recognition of the prominent role women have played in the past and of the much greater role, short of the priesthood, they would be playing under his pontificate.

When the French were preparing for their legislative elections in spring ‘78 … when it looked like the Left could sneak past the Right and take over … Jacques Chirac set up offices in the only real skyscraper in Paris, the Tour Montparnasse.

He needed a lot of room, and he wanted everything new and modern. Women sat around tables opening letters, receipting contributions, stuffing printed speeches into envelopes. Men in grey suits moved from office to office at a pace that made one think there was something very urgent happening. Phones rang constantly. The walls were covered with photos and posters of Jacques Chirac. Pencil holders on desks were plastic cups with Chirac's picture. His name and face were everywhere. The scene was reminiscent of Richard Nixon's campaign headquarters in 1968. The only difference was that Nixon had the presidency at stake then and Chirac didn't… at least he wouldn't say he did.

GOMA: I think only about existing conditions, because under the existing circumstances thinking about a future ideal seems like thinking about a Utopian fantasy. I concentrate on thinking about improving the present condition of life in Rumania. If I were free to think about my ideal of government, it would be a "rotten bourgeois democracy." Make sure you put those last three words in quotation marks, because I am quoting the Rumanian Government's words.

Chief Gatsha Buthelezi is a dazzling, and controversial, figure on the South African scene. Of royal blood—a direct descendant of the great Zulu warrior kings of the last century—he draws the natural respect of many of the country's nearly five million Zulus. They form the biggest single population group, outstripping the ruling whites in number. Buthelezi is as conscious of his hereditary role as are his followers

Through his political actions of unceasing attack against racial apartheid, Buthelezi, aged fifty, also earns the support of many other blacks. He is a vocal and articulate proponent of a united and nonracial South Africa, which brings him white liberal support.

Kofi Awoonor's novels, poems, and literary criticism have been acclaimed in many countries. Nevertheless, he is probably best known in the United States for the harassment and imprisonment he suffered in his native country of Ghana three years ago.

Awoonor was arrested on December 31, 1975, in Cape Coast, Ghana, and held without charges for several months. A number of human rights organizations issued strong protests. Amnesty International, International P.E.N., P.E.N. American Center (Bernard Malamud, Jerzy Kosinski, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Kazin, and Thomas Fleming were among those who spoke out on his behalf), and the Committee to Free Kofi Awoonor, based at Stony Brook on Long Island, were some of the more vocal protestors.

U.S.-China relations are changing so rapidly that it is hard to establish a critical position about their long-range implications. It is pleasant to think of the enmities of the past retreating into well-deserved oblivion. Looking ahead, it is tempting to see the Coca-Cola contract as a spearhead into the world's most populous common market. A billion people—eager to modernize, ready at last for Western everything, from technology to tourism. The prospect is enough to drive considerations of prudence out of sight.

In the early hours of Wednesday, April 4, 1979, the engimatic life of ex-Premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ended by a hangman's noose, at the express direction of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, whom Bhutto a few years ago had lifted from virtual obscurity to be his. chief of staff. Pakistan's most formidable politician died after a nineteen-month legal battle over charges that he had conspired to murder a political opponent. The death watch for Bhutto may be over— but not the turbulence in Pakistan.

Carved out of British India in 1947, Pakistan was created in response to Muslim nationalism articulated by a visionary lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. To date the country is still struggling to validate its creation.

As s a black North American whose theological consciousness was shaped in the historical context of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and the subsequent rise of Black Power during the 1960's, I find it difficult to speak about the future of African theology without relating it to the struggle for freedom in the United Stales of America. The concern to accent the distinctiveness of the African context has led many African theologians to separate African theology, not only from traditional European theology, but also from American black theology.