Small Town America

...We, thus, would seem to be passing up opportunities to enhance our security in ways that could offer more long-term assurance than the addition of new weapons...

...Even a lover of big boulevards and Broadway like Fitzgerald has a few evocative lines about small towns, but those Lingeman quotes serve also to bring back other lines about "lost Swede towns" and fading postmarks from upstate New York and also remind you of all the major writers, Fitzgerald included, whose most damning indictment of small town America was their near-silence on the subject...

...Professors of liturgy and of religious education will rejoice to see mis text, though they may wish to supplement it with a treatment of ministry and to update its account of the current posiThe Francis Book, complied and edited by Roy M. Gasniek, O.F.M., Comer/ Macmillan, $12.95,223 pp...

...In the first half of it, purTen Commandments/or the Long Haul, by Daniel Berrigan, Abingdon, $9.9$, 160pp...

...Not so, say the authors...

...To my mind we must learn to live with the bomb, not just for tens of years or even centuries, but perhaps for millennia...

...Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church, by Joseph Martos, Douneday, $15.95, 548 pp...

...He was born and grew up in Crawfordsville, Ind...

...And "apologizing whep you are wrong is perhaps one of the hardest assertions of all," say Emmons and Richardson...

...Steady steps needed Washington, D.C...

...A fresh appraisal of the Christian pattern for human interaction is offered by Michael Emmons and David Richardson in The Assertive Chris-.tian...

...Here, I think, is a good book to save for rumination on a quiet train ride in the indefinite future, and immediately I recognize in mat thought the self-defensive recoil typically experienced by many readers of Berrigan...

...In American folklore the small town is either Eden or Zenith and one of the considerable accomplishments of Richard Lingeman's "Small Town America" is that his protrait is balanced, whole and unburdened by either hostility or sentimentality in its pursuit of the reality behind the twin myths...

...might approach the task of creating one's own human being, one's self...

...That's the heart of the problem...

...Personal commitment Washington, D.C...

...Sanford, a priest and analyst, proposes in his Jungian retelling of the old biographies a plausible explanation for the healing, whole-making power which people of faith tradiThe Man Who Wrestled With God, by John A. Sanford, Pautttt, $6.95,126pp...

...Or-big, $7.95,226 pp...

...Reagan's first official acts was to cut contracted food aid shipments to Mozambique, followed in recent months by official blockage of humanitarian food and medical shipments by individual American citizens to Vietnam and cessation of food sales to Nicaragua...

...PAUL C. WARNKE (Mr...

...The reasons for such "aid" are to be sought in the Pentagon's concept of Gulf and Indian Ocean strategy and in Reagan's support for a client Somalia juxtaposed to a Soviet-backed Ethiopia...

...As one who has followed this subject closely for many years both while serving in the government and prior to, and since, that service, I find the present stance of our government disappointing...

...And not merely the softer side of that world: ". . . every town had its 'shacktown' where the very poor lived...

...The necessary framework is there and the negotiating process is available...

...There have been other studies of small town life in America, and Lingeman has absorbed them all, (Continued on page 574) THE average man or woman of letters may expect to read twelve to fifteen thousand books in die course of a career in teaching, writing, and research...

...Foster was director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1962 to 1969...

...textbook of sacramental theology in mis country since Vatican II upset the liturgical applecart nearly twenty years ago...

...food aid and reconstruction support for a future Somalia committed to deescalation of conflict in the Horn and to the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace...

...In Somalia much more than in the Sahel, the United States is providing a very large proportion of both food aid and reconstruction finance...

...This is an engaging glimpse of the cultural experience of rural Africans - time and mourning, welcoming a visitor, waiting patiently for public transportation or medical care, walking together with friends - and of Christianity's incarnation therein...

...Now on first blush you might take the two terms in that intriguing title to be mutually exclusive...

...Accordingly, I think the better course is a steady, step-by-step development of a succession of arms control agreements that can control and preclude further qualitative "improvements" and effect significant quantitative reductions...

...Joseph Martos has produced the first credible comprehensive To Advance the Gospel: New Testament Studies, by Joseph A. Fitzmytr, SJ., Crtmroad, $19.95,278 pp...

...tion of theologians such as Edward Scbillebeeckx...

...That's perhaps the best, if not the only note that can be struck in the terrible trough that we find ourselves in now, between the waves of arms control efforts of the sixties and seventies and, hopefully, those of the future...

...One suspects that the homespun texture of the prose is calculated to generate support in the United ' States for the missions...

...As the Arabs would have it, "it takes two hands to clap.'' Powers quite poignantly points out, "We can never forget how to build nuclear weapons...

...WILLIAM C. FOSTER (Mr...

...Jesus and numerous other biblical personages behaved in assertive ways, which is to say that they openly and honestly expressed themselves "without running roughshod over other people...

...The result is a work that will surely stand as the classic study of the subject for many years to come...

...It may be that the road to abolition of nuclear weapons must lie in the international political evolutions of a kind which we cannot now even imagine...

...Here is the sour and the bitter, the salt and just a little sweet, of the poet's incisive conscience...

...Small towns prevailed or, at any rate, endured, especially in literature...

...We should not forget that one of Mr...

...Warnke was chief negotiator of SALT II, 1977-78...

...smug . . .") that are themselves not associated with liveliness of subject matter...

...The fact that the history of arms control has been largely "a history of failure" is not because effective, verifiable agreements cannot be fashioned but rather because die political support for such agreements has been weak and inconstant...

...But that is all the more reason for getting on with the process of controlling weapons-and in the meantime "let us Pray...

...Three recent scholarly books deserve a greeting...

...Speaking of assertive Christians . . . I Religious booknotes The tusk one's self Marianne Sawicki Daniel Berrigan has gathered together some autobiographical jottings for a volume in Abingdon's series '.'Journeys in Faith," to which Martin E. Marty also recently contributed his By Way of Response...

...Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, William Allen White, Booth Tarkington and the rest, they're all here, grinding axes, fondly remembering...

...It is also affectionate, and, above all, a work of first-rate historical and literary scholarship...

...nevertheless, the sympathetic and detailed treatment of Julius' Nyerere's Ujamaa socialism, that is, socialism conceived after the model of the African extended family, and of Bishop ChrisA Fifth Gospel: The Experience of Black Christian Values, by Joseph Healey...

...Joseph A. Fitzmyer has collected essays on biblical topics spanning a decade in To Advance the Gospel...

...Powers is dead right that "a move in this direction away from war must be personal before it can be political...

...stagnant...

...Powers points out, no system of international inspection or control could prevent the renewed manufacture of nuclear weapons, nor do I believe that any foreseeable inspection or control system could confirm their complete non-existence...

...Also, I came to realize that however difficult it may be for American leaders to take new initiatives in the field of arms restraint, it is far more difficult for Soviet leaders to do so, given the extreme rigidities of their system...

...His Doors to the Sacred looks like a solid theoretical and historical treatment of the sacraments...

...Delightful...

...We may be depriving ourselves of the one measure - that of bringing projected military spending down to reasonable levels - which seems to offer hope for the recovery of our economy...

...To the Editors: I read Thomas Powers's thoughtful piece, "Principles'of Abolition: Eight Reasons for Getting Rid of the Bomb" with great interest...

...A million Ethiopian refugees, mostly women and children, in Somali camps are thus vulnerable to the erratic policy of an administration that has used the "food weapon" at least three times in its first six months in office...

...topher Mwoleka's corresponding organization of lay leadership in local church units, is valuable and instructive...

...However, something more needs to be said...

...To turn the other cheek is a properly assertive response in situations of conflict: it is a "stay-in-there" response, the one to be preferred to 'the alternatives of fight or flight...

...I wonder, however, whether abandoning the thus far glacially-paced arms control process for a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons holds any genuine promise in the current international regime...

...In the second half are the commandments: a selection of the terse words of Jesus,' such as "Do not be afraid," and, "Co, teach," with meditations...

...its inhabitants were nonpersons, the invisible poor, excluded from the community...

...It will be interesting to see if Mitterand's Sahelian reconstruction aid will take more of Franke and Chasin's "dilemmas" into account...

...GERARD C. SMITH (Mr...

...A special responsibility thus falls on us, whether we like it or not...

...Yet Linge-man's book is more than lively, it brings to full life a world: "It was a time when-in the nostalgic memories of some at least-life was lived out in the soft light of a tree-shaded street on a summer afternoon, to the soft slip-clop of horses, the drone of bees and cicadas, the clink of ice in the lemonade pitcher, the creak of the porch swing-a time of pause and prosperity...

...The Athens of Indiana") and in the writing of this book he visited a host of small towns in every part of the United States...

...Smith was -chief negotiator of SALT I, 1970-73...

...As Mr...

...Even if the "dilemmas" haunting Sahelian (and other Third World) development projects could be circumvented by "sound development policies," are such programs not increasingly vulnerable to the primitive and short-sighted foreign policy decisions of the West's neoconservative regimes...

...Nothing beats a story's magnetic power to polarize life projects whose path it crosses...

...The phenomenon is used to advantage by John A. San-ford, who presents four familiar life-stories from the Hebrew Scriptures using a depth-psychological angle in The Man Who Wrestled With God...

...But beyond the necessary millions of personal commitments, there remains the murky sphere of the means which will be available to the new abolitionists...

...Personally, since visiting Somalia's refugee camps earlier this year, I am troubled by an even more serious possible nightmare...

...Regimes in both Ethiopia and Somalia are very unstable...

...All that is lacking is the political will to use it...

...Free and Faithful in Christ, Volume 3: Light to Ike World, by Bernard Raring, Crossroad, $17.50, 451 pp...

...financial influence in those programs may well dilute any such attempts...

...However, the dominance of U.S...

...The 'food weapon' New Brunswick, N.J...

...Administration officials whose fingers are so quick on the trigger of the so-called "food weapon" are not likely to be the ones to puzzle through or to apply "sound development policies...

...About the only social services they received were blows from a policeman's club when they were obstreperous and baskets from the Ladies' Aid when they were hungry...

...Powers's central thesis, that countries should be prepared to forego nuclear weapons, seems to me unassailable...

...Stories of a different sort put the heart and soul in a most extraordinary book by missioner Joseph G. Healey about the young church of Tanzania, A Fifth Gospel...

...This set of commandments seems more adventuresome than the original ten...

...The best hope for averting the growing risk of nuclear war is prompt ratification of the SALT II treaty, and immediate efforts to restrict long-range theater forces in Europe and to provide for steady reductions in existing inventories...

...Any half-dozen citizens chosen at random would certainly free-associate the words "small town America" with words ("sleepy . . . hypocritical . . . provincial...

...The third volume of Bernard Haring's Free and Faithful in Christ, entitled Light to the World, has appeared...

...To the Editors: The article by Franke and Chasin on "Africa's Other Famine" [July 3 ] provided a useful and clear summary of the long historical build-up of the Sahelian tragedy as well as a timely review of progress (or lack of it) in reconstructing the area since 1974...

...Shacktown was the bottom of the heap, the end of the line...

...BEN WISNER Visiting Lecturer Department of Human Ecology and Social Sciences, Cook College Rutgers, The State University of N.J.l Sciences, Cook College Rutgers, The State University of N.J...

...Its two parts, "Bioethics" and "Healing of Public Life," offer conservative but freshly and compassionately reasoned approaches to the moral issues of abortion, war, and the threatened environment, among many others...

...tionally have experienced in imaginatively reading the Scriptures...

...Of that formidable number, perhaps we value most highly and cherish best those books which can give some genuinely useful insight into how one The Assertive Christum, by Michael Emmons and David Richardson, Winston, $5.95,179 pp...

...STEPHEN DARST Correspondence (Continued from page 546) relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and further assurance against the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries...

...The considerable human appeal of this book aside, it ought to be read carefully as a forecast for the future of the universal church and the church in the United States...

...Berrigan's book is called Ten Commandments for the Long Haul...

...Can we count on U.S...

...There is comfort aplenty here for those of us who dislike the equation of Christianity with domestic peace at any price...

...To the Editors: I read with great interest and considerable sympathy the article by Thomas Powers on "Principles of Abolition" [July 31 ]. Mr...

...When negotiating the Non-Proliferation Treaty with the Soviet Union and a number of non-nuclear countries, I saw how closely these two objectives depend on each other...

...And for dessert: The Francis Book comes to us from Roy M. Gasniek, who has collected pictures and essays from quite diverse sources into a large and appealing paperback volume celebrating the eight-hundredth birthday of Assisi's most famous son...

...Arnold Toynbee has said that the nation state cannot coexist with the split atom...

...Our arms control apparatus seems to have been placed in the hands of a group of men who have had distinguished careers in their fields, to be sure, but who are hardly known for their enthusiastic support of arms control negotiations...

...Certainly the contrary suppositions, that we must be able to use our nuclear arsenal to advance our foreign policy objectives, or that nuclear weaponry can serve to implement a policy of global Soviet containment, are not only ludicrous but reckless...

...portedly a diary, we are treated to random flashbacks and reflections penned during a semester which Berrigan spent recently at the Jesuit seminary in Berkeley...

...Don't rattle my human project just now, Dan, with your troublesome stories...

...The book rehearses specific situations in counseling and in parish politics, and suggests appropriately assertive courses of action...

...What if both the Somali and the Ethiopian people tire, as is highly likely, more quickly than the Great Powers of the useless conflict in the Horn of Africa...

...Are your readers aware of just how tenuous are the international aid commitments that support not only famine relief but the kinds of development work described in the article...

...MARIANNE SAWICKI along with unpublished letters and documents...

...The same Spirit who found Wojfyla in Warsaw breathes today in the villages of Rulenge Diocese...