December 1987
American Purpose
Issue 10, Volume 1

Publication Date: December 1, 1987
Posted: Tuesday, December 12, 1987

This issue includes 'A Seasonal Meditation, with Thanks to William Faulkner'; 'Peace on (Part of) Earth'; 'Peace on (Another Part of) Earth', 'Archbishop Stafforad Oim'; 'Remembering Scoop'; 'Religious Liberty in Lithuania'; and 'In Brief'.


In This Issue :

A Seasonal Meditation, with Thanks to William Faulkner
 AMERICAN PURPOSE is not your basic holiday greeting card. But if it were, we would want to use William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize address as our text at this season: now, when the great religious traditions speak of a divine promise of "peace on earth" and the gap between that promise and the headlines looms as large as ... well, as large as it did in December 1986. Faulkner's lecture is an appropriately seasonal, clarion call to hope, made all the more powerful because its author was a man who, in his own writing, had plumbed various of the darker recesses of the human mind and spirit and had come away whole.  [More]

Peace on (Part of) Earth
The Central American peace plan negotiated in August 1987 by the presidents of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua is certain to remain an object of debate in the new year. Yet the discussion over the past several months seems to have lacked the necessary specificity. What, concretely, would have to happen, were there to be peace with freedom in Central America?  [More]

Peace on (Another Part of) Earth
The debate over a treaty eliminating medium and short-range (INF) missiles in Europe will surely be another hot item in 1988. Prior to the finalization of the treaty, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski tried to locate the debate in a longer view of history:  [More]

Archbishop Stafforad Oim
The Quest for Peace and Freedom
AMERICAN PURPOSE has not been hesitant to criticize those voices in the American religious community whose approach to "work for peace" has seemed to us deficient. It's only fair, therefore, to note the good news, too. Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Francis Stafford of Denver issued a pastoral letter this past May that could help set a new standard for the religious debate over America's right role in world affairs.  [More]

Remembering Scoop
What if . . . ? is an endlessly fascinating historical game. What if the Confederacy had won the War between the States? If Alexander Kerensky had made reformist social democracy work after the fall of the Czar in 1917? If Woodrow Wilson had agreed to see Ho Chi Minh during the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference? If the Allies had invaded France in 1943, and World War II had ended with American and British troops in Berlin, western Poland, Prague, and Budapest?  [More]

Religious Liberty in Lithuania
On September 15, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 400 to 0, HR 192, a resolution supporting the struggle for religious liberty in Lithuania. The resolution was introduced in June by Congressmen John Miller (R-Washington) and Edward Feighan (D-Ohio) and was co-sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of forty-two members of the House. Miller and Feighan also co-chair a small working group of House members formed this year to lobby Soviet officials on behalf of persecuted believers in Lithuania. One aim of this bipartisan effort is to link, again, the issues of religious liberty and peace in the congressional debate over U.S./Soviet relations.  [More]

In Brief
SIGNIFICANT CHANGES, INDEED. The Understatement-of-the-Year Award goes to James Le Moyne of the New York Times, whose analysis of the Central American presidents' treaty included the following summary insight into Managua politics: "In essence the treaty guarantees political survival to the Sandinistas if they agree to stop running the country like a one-party socialist state. Since the Sandinistas have been a revolutionary party since their founding 25 years ago, such a change would be significant."  [More]