Brian Wicker’s new book is important not only because of the analysis which he gives of our historical present and of the potencies within it but also because of the sources on which he calls to establish his analysis and the terms in which he calls on them. They are terms particularly congenial to the literary imagination, for one reason because they suggest a renewed life for poetry. Briefly, Mr Wicker argues that it would be a mistake to see our historical moment as one in which a conception of the sacred is fighting unequally against the secular actuality, or in which secularism must be accepted by Christians as a providential subversion of myths no longer acceptable to reason. On the contrary, he says, the most rational account of our condition, both existential and essential, is one in which a conception of the sacred will be not only preserved, not only renewed either, but remade. His account of this may bring unease both to those who think there is only one way to talk about the sacred and to those who think it retrograde to talk about the sacred at all.

In speaking in such terms he is of course speaking from within a cultural dilemma whose nature he recognizes; our society in so far as it is opting for ‘secularism’ is opting to sit on one horn of the dilemma; for its refusal of the sacred is not only a refusal of a ‘meaning’ in and for life but an inability to participate fully in the world of meaningful presences and activities.

The present generation of parents and other educators faces a particular problem: having been brought up for the most part with little or no sex instruction, having been protected to some extent by the pressures of social convention, they find themselves faced by a generation of young men and women who talk freely about sex, who say openly that they are not prepared to accept the traditional teaching of the Churches with regard to sexual behaviour and for whom the fear of an illegitimate pregnancy is no longer the deterrent to fornication that it may have been in the past. To make matters even more perplexing, the young men have long hair which used to be thought a symbol of homosexuality and the young women wear mini-skirts which is confusing for a generation of men accustomed to thinking of the exposed female thigh as a non-verbal communication of a specific kind. What are they to do ? Judging by the number of books currently flooding the market, at least part of the answer seems to be ‘read a book about sex’ for, with no statistical evidence, I’d be prepared to guess that it is this generation rather than the one at risk that is doing most of the reading—perhaps the others are too busy with the field work.

The first of these three paperbacks, Sense and Nonsense about Sex, purports to be written for teenagers, and more specifically appears to be directed to Protestant teenagers in youth clubs, but I find it hard to imagine any young man or woman actually reading it.

This is not an exhaustive study of contemplation, and I omit severa important aspects of the subject; most drastically, I omit any discussion of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. I feel entitled to do so for two reasons: first, that Christ characterized himself as ‘the way’, and it is therefore permissible to make a preliminary enquiry, such as this present one, into what, in general, one is looking for in an approach to God. And secondly, we no longer know Christ himself in the flesh. To see Christ is to see the Father: but how do we see Christ? To some extent we may re-assimilate the problem of knowing Christ to that of knowing God (though since the Incarnation, one cannot leave it at that, obviously; otherwise the Incarnation would have no enduring revelatory significance, which it clearly has).

In English we are unfortunate in having only one word ‘know’ for both savoir and connaître; for the distinction is very important between knowing a fact, and knowing a person, and it is easy to create devastating problems for ourselves by tacitly assimilating contemplation of God to savoir rather than connaître.

The most obvious distinction between knowing a fact and knowing a person is that the former is abstract and general, while the latter is particular. The object of the former type of knowledge, being an abstraction, only exists in my mind. In Buber’s terminology, there is an I-It relationship, an It always being only a part of my world.

‘Our bishops have warned us: “There is a grave danger that the circumstances of the present war may, in time, diminish our moral sensitivity to its evils”. We fear that this very danger has become actualized. We face a severe crisis of conscience within our Catholic community that arises from the incongruity between the moral principles enunciated by the Church and the uncritical support of this war by so many Catholics’: from the Catholic Committee on Vietnam—Open letter to the clergy and laity of the United States.

Since the beginning of 1965, the Committee of Clergy and Laymen concerned about Vietnam, comprising distinguished figures such as Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, John C. Bennett, President of the Union Theological Seminary, Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr, together with Protestant bishops and many prominent rabbis, has maintained constant moderate pressure on the administration to bring about a non-military solution to the Vietnam conflict. Although it was reported in Herder Correspondence for September/October 1966 that Cardinal Cushing was on the committee, this report proved to be a misunderstanding caused by a priest from the Boston Diocese who did support the concern. None of the Catholic Hierarchy has supported the committee, though two of the bishops have found themselves able to give private help and encouragement. There has been a number of reports of attempts at dissuading clergy from associating themselves with public protests organized by the group.