Word: novaks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...explaining why he will help launch a new magazine called Catholicism in Crisis, Michael Novak [Nov. 8] makes dubious use of the precedent set by Reinhold Niebuhr in establishing Christianity and Crisis. True, Niebuhr founded C & C in 1941 to overcome the appeal of pacifism then pervasive in the Protestant churches. But 25 years later, writing on the Viet Nam War, Niebuhr addressed a new set of realities: "The problem of indiscriminate pacifism ... has given way to the problem of curbing pure force in the international realm...
...Novak, who defends nuclear deterrence as a way of preserving peace, primarily challenges the bishops on strategic grounds. "Their position would make war much more likely," he says. He feels the underlying political flaw is blindness to the Soviet threat. "What is amazing is the profound anti-Americanism of the document," he insists. "You cannot face this moral question without facing the reality of the Soviet Union. The bishops are holding Europe hostage to abstract thinking, because the absence of an American deterrent would raise the probability of a Soviet invasion. You don't qualify as a peacemaker just...
...theological grounds, Novak faults the bishops for adopting "a sentimental view of the Bible" that he feels has proliferated since the 1965 Vatican II convocation of the Roman Catholic Church, when there was a turn away from Catholic intellectual traditions in philosophy and theology in favor of a greater devotional reliance on scripture. Says he: "The passages they quote and the visions they take represent a soft and romantic reading of Christian theology, a Utopian view. I think it is an outrage to identify this sentimentality with faith in Jesus Christ. I don't think Jesus promises us that...
...This is not the first time a well-intentioned cry for peace has made war more likely," Novak says, referring to the religious pacifist movement in the 1930s. In response to that earlier crisis, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of Novak's mentors, started the magazine Christianity and Crisis, which, beginning in 1941, argued that American Christians must fight to resist totalitarianism. Novak and other lay intellectuals plan to launch this month a similar magazine, Catholicism in Crisis. Sums up Novak: "The laity is supposed to lead in Christian reflection on this-worldly matters...
...conservative upsurge is not entirely spontaneous. Reviving the right on campus has been a deliberate goal of the Institute for Educational Affairs, a New York-based foundation, whose roster of directors, which includes Authors Irving Kristol and Michael Novak and Economist Murray Weidenbaum, looks like a Who's Who among conservatives. Funded by other foundations and by dozens of corporations, the I.E.A. since 1980 has financed academic research and has given a total of more than $100,000 to some 15 student publications, in many cases enabling their birth. A grant made last Friday will launch a paper...