March 1987
American Purpose
Issue 3, Volume 1

Publication Date: March 1, 1987
Posted: Sunday, March 3, 1987

This issue includes 'Light from the East: Peace Freedom, and the Civil Society'; 'Fog from the West'; 'And, Last but Not Least, from the South...'; 'The Chroniclers'; and the 'The Hauerwas Thesis'.


In This Issue :

LIGHT FROM THE EAST
PEACE, FREEDOM, AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY
Press and popular attention to matters of East and West naturally tends to focus on the extravaganzas: summit conferences, the public diplomacy of presidents, prime ministers, general secretaries (and now general secretaries' wives), and so forth. We all like a show, and these things are part of the show of international public life, so one shouldn't be too demeaning of them.  [More]

FOG FROM THE WEST
Tone-deafness to the message of men such as Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, and George Konrad is not a disability of Western activists alone, of course. Several senior Western political leaders have done their bit, over the past months, to blow fog over the terrain that the new Central European intellectuals have laboriously worked to clear. In November, for example, Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of Spain, visiting Cuba, praised Fidel Castro as a "freedom-fighter." Castro responded with Cuba's highest decoration, the Order of Jose Marti. Previous recipients, the Economist noted, were a "small, elite band of leaders: such as the late Leonid Brezhnev, Erich Honecker of East Germany, [and] Kim II Sung of North Korea...."  [More]

AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST, FROM THE SOUTH…
Arturo Cruz of Nicaragua is a man intuitively in sync with the message of Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and George Konrad. One of the many victims of the Iran/arms scandal was Cruz's remarkable proposal for the post-Sandinista future of his country.  [More]

THE CHRONICLERS
You won't see it offered for discount sale by Publishers Clearing House. You may not even be able to find it in the better public libraries. But it is, for all its obscurity, perhaps the most impressive human rights journal in the world today.  [More]

THE HAUERWAS THESES
Professor Stanley Hauerwas of the Duke University Divinity School is on anybody's short list of the most provocative and thoughtful moral theologians practicing that ancient craft in America today. Professor Hauerwas is also a living embodiment of American ecclesiastical pluralism; five years ago, when he was teaching under the golden dome in South Bend, Indiana, he defined himself in these distinctive terms:  [More]