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It is imperative in our times to review and reconsider the relationships between religion and economics. On both the popular and the scholarly level, our understanding lags behind our perception of the significance of religion in a socially, politically, and economically complex world, and of changes in the relationship between religion and economics.

The West is today what it has been for a number of decades, the center and source of powerful ideas incarnated in institutions and practices from whose effects no corner of the globe is wholly immune. It is the great disturber of other cultures. Thus, mutatis mutandis, the West takes its place with the ancient Orient, with classical Greece, with Islam, with the great civilizations that extended and imposed themselves through differing proportions of military power, commerce, and high cultural confidence.In its development the West has been informed by the profound contributions of the Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian traditions, and it cannot be understood without reference to them. But the factors that allowed the West first to become a great economic force and second to extend that force into the ecumene have their immediate causes in the eighteenth century. This period in Europe, variously termed the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, elevated to prominence and gave particular meaning to such abstract social concepts as "liberty," "equality," "rights," and "authority."

On September 2, 1945, the Vietnamese Communists raised their red flag in Hanoi to proclaim the independent Republic of Vietnam. The group that saluted the flag included the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and American officers in uniform.On April 30, 1975, the last helicopter of an evacuation airlift rose from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. As the Americans fled Saigon, forces of the North Vietnam Army entered the city and renamed it Ho Chi Minh. South Vietnam ceased to exist as a separate state; the last official vestiges of American participation in a disastrous, losing war disappeared; and the Communists of North Vietnam consolidated their control over the entire country.

There is in this land a certain restlessness, a questioning," said President Lyndon Johnson when he delivered his State of the Union message at the beginning of 1968. How right he was. And to his own question of "why, why this restlessness?" he responded: "Because when a great ship cuts through the seas, the waters are stirred and troubled. And our ship is moving…."What Lyndon Johnson overlooked in his neat metaphor was that a lot of passengers on that ship were stirred and troubled, fearing that they were on a new Titanic setting due course for a large iceberg that was highly visible to them but apparently not to Captain Johnson and his crew.