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Jim Wallis's The Call to Conversion features an apocalyptic theological imagination with an ecclesiological focus. The church is entrusted with the communal mission of making visible the intrusion of the reign of God in Jesus Christ. The thesis of this essay is that The Call to Conversion is a better resource for Christian political engagement than Wallis's more recent book, God's Politics, which is characterized by a turn toward a "public church" social ethic. The accent has shifted to the formation of a larger political movement seeking social change primarily through congressional lobbying. Wallis's error is the extent to which he has pinned his hopes on the institutions of American democracy. The Call to Conversion helps us recover an account of political engagement flowing from local ecclesial witness. Sheldon Wolin, Romand Coles, and other political theorists, provide support for approaches to political engagement that begin with local struggles for justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crane's essay begins to engage the complex, polyvalent nature of the so-called Jewish Question in the early twentieth century by following closely the evolving ideas of a French intellectual who eventually emerged from his association with figures such as Action Francaise leader Charles Maurras to offer a sustained and vehement rejection of antisemitism, a rejection itself almost unheard of in respectable circles. The philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) has been identified as an extraordinarily philosemitic member of the Catholic intelligentsia in interwar France. Having broken with the anti-democratic and antisemitic Maurras in 1927, by the late 1930s Maritain established an international reputation as an outspoken anti-fascist and opponent of antisemitism. In response to the intensification of anti-Jewish prejudice in interwar Europe, he strove to advance a metahistorical understanding of what might be called the Sacred Jew in an era in which the racially hygienic construct of the Dirty Jew threatened to prevail in contexts ranging from the gutter to the drawing room to the classroom. But Maritain's recasting of the timely Jewish Question as the timeless Mystery of Israel amounted to just as much of an expression of the political-cultural anxieties of the interwar period as its racist and ever more eliminationist counterpart, articulated as the so-called Jewish Problem. Both removed the Jewish object of the question from the perspective of visible mundane reality and uncovered—or recovered—hidden apocalyptic secrets. Maritain's vision of Jewish identity in the modern world, as it developed in the 1920s and 1930s, thus proved inseparable from his negotiation of the personal and public crises of his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the data which highlights the number of failures of international medical graduates in the clinical skills assessment (CSA).