Woodstock College, folded into the hills of Maryland, is a historic place—the first, and for long the best, Jesuit school of theology in this country. Its main building, hewn of native white stone over a hundred years ago, is very impressive, each wing of it backed by semi-detached high bell towers. The story goes that plans for the seminary had been drawn up and sent off to Rome for approval, but that construction had already begun when Rome sent back a query: Suntne angeli? (“Are they angels there?”). The plans had not included toilet facilities, which were belatedly concentrated, floor by floor, in the towers, whose steamed upper windows hold no bells after all.

A few days before Christmas, 1971, the Protestant Federation of France published a 12,000-word draft statement, Eglise et Pouvoirs, which immediately caused repercussions around the world. The extraordinary, and for the French Protestant leaders startling, controversy over the statement was initiated by the French centrist newspaper Le Monde. On December 19 it printed a full page of extracts from the document under the provocative title “The French Protestant Federation declares: Our society is unacceptable.”

Immediately, all the French dailies and weeklies came out with numerous quotations and analyses, constituting a press reaction greater than any ever caused by a church statement in French history. The foreign press, notably the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, were not far behind. Press, radio and TV reporters brought a sudden and unwonted animation to the offices of the Protestant Federation of France (an old building, the House of French Protestantism, on the Rue de Clichy across from the Casino de Paris, famous music hall of Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier).

Men and women receiving their bachelor's degrees now have for the most part been those who entered college near the end of what has been the greatest boom period in American academic history. With accelerating momentum during the last four years, it can at least be suggested that the academic analogue of the Great Crash of 1929 has occurred. Universities are even more diversified than the securities listed on the stock exchanges; they are not so closely interlinked; hence, what is a depression in some institutions is a mild recession or a plateau in others, and perhaps a pause that refreshes in still others. There are surely some institutions (until recently, the University of Texas was one) so richly supported that they could use the slack market for faculty as a time for academic bargain-hunting.

If the superpowers are, as is commonly suggested, passing through a time of crisis, so inevitably are the “middle powers,” for the states that for twenty-five years have been collectively but erratically referred to as middle powers are groping for their place in a system determined by the giants. At San Francisco in 1945 the middle powers seemed to have found a mission in frustrating the great power determination to brook as little interference as possible in their ordering of world politics. When the great powers fell apart, the middle-power front was also broken. Its members found their niches in alliance with the great powers or in a status they called nonalignment. Alignment and nonalignment make sense, however, only in relation to the great powers' division.

There is much lively speculation about the direction that United States foreign policy is taking under President Nixon's Administration. Many observers believe that Nixon's foreign policy is being directed toward disengagement. The arguments to support this thesis tend, however, to differ. Some say that the Vietnam war has led to internal frustration and has tended to demonstrate that the U.S. cannot indefinitely play the role of policeman to the world. Consequently, unless Washington drops its policy of intervention—so goes the argument— the national morale will be so eroded that the country will face serious internal political problems.

I begin by declaring my intellectual interest: I share the cold war convictions and the counterrevolutionary attitudes which Richard J. Walton attributes to President Kennedy in Cold War and Counter-Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (Viking; 234 pp.; $7.95). What he states as accusations are beliefs which I—and I think the late President—would willingly avow. Moreover, in the nearly nine years since Kennedy's death when the revisionist attacks on his presidency have steadily mounted, my own admiration for Kennedy has grown. I thought fairly well of him at the time. In the light of what has happened since his death, he seems to me an absolutely towering figure. I am either the worst or the best possible person to comment on this book.

American Protestantism, long something of a sacred cow in American life and politics, now finds itself seriously threatened by government on several fronts. The battle is shaping up over church tax exemptions, and the stakes, for both church and society, are breathtakingly high.

In July, 1909, the Communications Office of the United Church of Christ announced that it intended to testify before a Senate subcommittee on legislation regarding the renewal of television licenses. Two weeks later the good churchmen received notice from the Internal Revenue Service that “substantial” efforts to influence legislation could “jeopardize” the church's tax exemption.

The idea of decadence is intriguing. It conjures up visions of languor, mental if not physical harems, sensuous tedium, affluence past the point of satiety.

It is also an artful term with which to articulate our distaste for the present. It imbues our outrage with a certan Puritan vigor and, at the same time, a millennial grandeur, as we liken our condition to Rome or Byzantium on the eve of annihilation. We can entertain the idea of decadence—so-called decadent art and literature are enjoying a vogue, late-Victorian pornography, Beardsiey, art nouveau— while at the same time we disparage it.

But just what exactly is decadence, how do we deline it? Is it a useful phrase? Does it rightfully characterize the period through which we are living? Is America in the seventies decadent?