Salt II looms as the subject of our next great national debate. The SALT sellers and the Salt shakers have already outlined their campaign plans. And it is plain even now that a major element of the debate will be the verification process. As the intensity of the debate grows, so too does the likelihood of confusion for a public assailed by cries of alarm on one side and smooth assurances on the other, both proffering platoons of experts, dazzling data, and prognostications of doom if their views are not accepted.

The stream begins in a park near the military school on the outskirts of the medieval Saxon-built town of Sibiu. It burbles through grassy meadows and pine forests as nearby roads turn to dirt tracks and dignified nineteenth-century homes yield to occasional thatched huts and sheds. On a sun-dappled Sunday afternoon families play in the park. From time to time lovers vanish down the path, escaping from prying eyes in the rows of gabled houses and shops within a double ring of huge stone walls that were thrown up seven centuries ago to ward off the Tatars. "People here are afraid," says the young woman, a schoolteacher. She is perched on a walkway atop one of the outer walls. Beneath us ancient churches and towers shadow the town's twisting streets. "You don't know our rules."

U.S.-China relations are changing so rapidly that it is hard to establish a critical position about their long-range implications. It is pleasant to think of the enmities of the past retreating into well-deserved oblivion. Looking ahead, it is tempting to see the Coca-Cola contract as a spearhead into the world's most populous common market. A billion people—eager to modernize, ready at last for Western everything, from technology to tourism. The prospect is enough to drive considerations of prudence out of sight.

As President Carter prepared for his first official visit to Mexico in February, 1979, to discuss, among other things, U.S. access to its neighbor's new-found oil, the U.S. secretary of energy, James R. Schlesinger, warned that the security of the Western democracies could be completely undermined if instability became endemic in the Persian Gulf and the flow of oil to Europe, Japan, and the United States was sharply curtailed.

There was considerable irony in this situation. As columnist James Reston observed in the New York Times, the president was not going to Mexico "to deal with the price of Mexican gas—though that is an immediate and divisive problem—but with the price of neglect.

This little book will be as offensive to some Christian and Jewish believers as it certainly will be to determined secularists. That, plus a demanding style of presentation, will keep Pannenberg's Human Nature, Election, and History (Westminster; 116 pp.; $4.95) off anybody's best seller list, but that may be just as well. Arguments that relentlessly probe first principles and aim to upset our most deeply rooted assumptions need to be conditioned, as it were, in smaller and more disciplined discussion before they are readied for popular dissemination. Such a statement may seem frightfully elitist, but it would in no way embarrass Wolfhart Pannenberg.

Brazil grows good coffee and grotesque military despots. Now increasing numbers of courageous Brazilians are trying to recultivate democracy. Under the military regime that has ruled Brazil for the last fourteen-and-a-half years, torture and executions have been widespread, although the predations of the notorious "death squads" have abated in recent years. Perhaps ten thousand people, however, remain in political exile. Nearly five thousand more are official "nonpersons," with political and civil rights annulled, passports and travel rights withdrawn, and employment or business opportunities curtailed.

On my first Rumanian Sunday I sat on the toilet in a third-rate Bucharest hotel peering through the window at an open-air movie featuring John Wayne as cop. On my last Rumanian Sunday I sat in a country inn watching a television western featuring Clint Eastwood as good tough guy.

In between I saw little of such capitalist decadence. While Bucharest is a fashionable metropolis, the northeastern province of Moldavia, just a night train ride away, is another world.

America is a religious nation, but its historians, like most of its intellectuals, tend to be secular. As a result, American religious history has remained until relatively recently an intellectually underdeveloped field. The prevailing liberal and secular biases of most historians produced overviews of church history notable for anachronistic judgments and a general tendency to miss the point of religious experience. The history of American religion was regularly written from a perspective in which the chief ends of faith were liberty of conscience and the transformation of the social order. (These comments apply particularly to what might be termed the textbook consensus on American religion; they are less true of monographic studies or of the myriad—and often filiopietistic—denominational histories. As Herbert Butterfield noted almost fifty years ago in The Whig Interpretation of History, whig biases normally crop up in broad historical overviews rather than in detailed researches.)