CORRESPONDENCE

CORRESPONDENCE Saving Graces Silver Springs, Md. To the Editors' James T. Baker's article "Jimmy Carter's Religion" [July 1] was one of the most perceptive and balanced of the many articles I...

...The United States officials have made numerous pronouncements in the attempt to display their concern of the plight of the Africans in Southern Africa...
...The United States continues to give comfort to the regimes of Southern Africa...
...LEONARD T. KAPUNGU...
...Africans too love freedom and are prepared to die for it...
...The United States, born out of a revolution should not be hostile to those who are fighting revolutions to be free just as the Americans were called to arms in 1775 to fight a revolution to be free...
...At the risk of sounding like a pedant, I would like to correct two minor factual errors...
...To the Editors' James T. Baker's article "Jimmy Carter's Religion" [July 1] was one of the most perceptive and balanced of the many articles I have read during the last few months on the same topic...
...In fact, the United States had nothing but contempt for Africa...
...First, Richard Nixon, in a 1967 article in Billy Graham's magazine Decision, did claim to have been saved at a fundamentalist tent rally in his youth...
...The South African and Rhodesian regimes represent, as Carney puts it "the historical embodiment of the long-endured racial, economic and political oppression in the area of Southern Africa...
...Its author, John Newton, was an 18th-century slave-ship captain who was converted from his evil ways in 1748 and ordained to the ministry of the Church of England in 1764, being assigned as curate to the village of Olney...
...Secondly, the hymn "Amazing Grace," though adored certainly by many Baptists, is in no way a Baptist hymn...
...As Carney has vividly illustrated in his article, Africans are baffled when they continue to see the United States allying itself with those people whose actions run in contradiction with the American Declaration of Independence...
...The hymn is a product of Evangelical-Anglicanism...
...Henry Kissinger has been in charge of United States Foreign Policy, he has visited Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and not once did he think it was necessary to pay at least a courtesy call to Africa until th (Continued on page 574) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 547) Americans were caught by surprise in the Angolan crisis...
...In this Bicentennial Year, as the Americans reflect on their human freedoms in their Declaration of Independence Joseph P. Carney is calling upon them to reflect on the meaning of freedom...
...His father was a Bible-thumping Methodist of the kind now out of fashion in Methodism, while his mother was an evangelical Quaker...
...The United States under the Byrd Amendment continues to import chrome from Rhodesia...
...In the, almost eight years that Dr...
...To the Editors: The Angolan crisis brought home to the Americans and indeed to the whole world the fact that the United States had no African policy...
...Joseph P. Carney has written a brilliant article calling on his fellow Americans to reflect in this bicentennial year on why the United States was allied to South Africa in the Angolan crisis [Apr...
...But, as Carney says, it is not pronouncements that Africans look for, it is deeds, actions...
...The United States continues to refuse to recognize the Government of the People's Republic of Angola...
...While there he wrote 283 hymns, of which "Amazing Grace," written in 1779, is one...
...It is not only Americans who love to be free...
...ALBERT J. MENENDEZ Assistant Editor, Church & State No African Policy Riverdale, N.Y...

Vol. 103 • August 1976 • No. 18


 
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