Ernest Lefever

The Most Noble Adventure

A HALF CENTURY AGO, William F. Buckley, Jr., created quite a stir when he published God and Man At Yale, bemoaning the junior status accorded the Almighty within its ivied walls. Today a new phenomenon is sweeping the Yale campus, especially at Yale Divinity School, where in the mid-1940s I studied…

ON APRIL 25, Bill Moyers' Journal, opened its prime time season on PBS with the blare of trumpets and an undisclosed amount of taxpayer support. The Washington Post and Washington Times carried full-page ads touting his new series. Other papers chimed in. The Providence Journal called Moyers's…

BECAUSE OF AND in spite of Hollywood films like The African Queen and television shows like Tarzan, tropical Africa south of the Sahara and north of the Zambezi is terra incognita for most Americans. Some cling to fragments of the "noble savage" myth advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who argued…

IN SUB-SAHARAN Africa an estimated 30 million people have the HIV-AIDS virus. Some 17 million have died so far, and the disease kills 5,000 adults and 1,000 children every day--a rate 20 times that of Western countries. The crisis is especially grievous because it adds millions of victims to those…

MY FIRST VISIT to Washington, D.C. was as a child in the early 1930s. Holding my father's hand, I vividly recall seeing the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and the statue-cluttered Capitol Rotunda. Not yet built were the graceful Jefferson Memorial and the majestic Supreme Court building.…

IN 1937, while Hitler was tightening his grip on Germany and Stalin was killing "unreliable" Russian generals, Emperor Hirohito invaded China and massacred over 200,000 civilians in the Nationalist capital of Nanking. This was the brutal prelude to Japan's far-flung co-prosperity sphere in Asia…

Time magazine's April 20, 1962, cover story on Karl Barth announced that the great Swiss theologian would visit the United States for the first, and what turned out to be the only, time. Given Barth's well-known anti-American stance, the visit caused a stir in the White House. President Kennedy,…

A FEW YEARS AGO Al Gore, then dressed in his natural-hued attire, would have been out of place among the Hollywood elite, but last Sunday he was one of them and thrice hailed at the 79th Academy Awards dinner for his apocalyptic documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

IS THERE a chink in the armor of absolute opposition to capital punishment in America? In the wake of Saddam Hussein's hanging, a review of the post-mortem press suggests that there was some reluctance of the part of liberal anti-death penalty groups to clearly reaffirm their view that the death…

LAST MONTH on the 43rd anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, I had hoped that public reflections on that tragic event would be more discerning than in the past. I was disappointed.

Your editorial "It's Foreign Policy, Stupid" (Mar. 18) gives solid advice to Bob Dole, but permit me to take exception to the word "internationalist" to describe what Reagan was and what the Republicans should be.