BROTHER BALES’ REVIEW

We have with this issue’s installment of James D. Bales’ analysis of Voices of Concern run a full year, all ten numbers without a single miss. To do this has required about one-third of our pages for the year, which of course has crowded out material that we would otherwise have published. We notice that it has effected our income also, for notices of books have been drastically reduced.

At the outset there was serious question as to whether a confrontation between brother Bales and the authors of Voices could be arranged. Editor Meyers cautioned me about expecting a positive response, for many of the writers had submitted their essays with considerable reluctance, and it was unlikely that they would care to follow-up with anything like a debate. We are pleased that while we did find reluctance we were able to get responses from everyone we called on with but one exception. We issued repeated pleas to this sister to reply to brother Bales’ review of her piece, however indirectly, but she would not, insisting that I should pray for the man. Others yielded only when we insisted that they should-for the same reasons for which they first wrote.

Brother Bales has reviewed ten of the 16 essays. We have on hand his review of Milton Stolz’s piece, along with Milton’s reply, which we announced would be published this month. Since Roy Key had been invited first, we are publishing the Bales-Key exchange. It appeared Roy was not going to reply, so we urged Milton to get his in to us for this month. Roy’s arrived in the meantime, so we have honored that priority. We are sorry we cannot run Bales’ remaining reviews for which we have replies, Milton Stolz’s and Robert Meyers’, but we have reached the end of the year and we must stop.

One regret is that brother Bales never reviewed the essay by Norman Parks, which is surely one of the most perceptive of the articles. Even at our suggestion that he be sure to do so, he did not. We had Prof. Parks waiting in the wings, more eager for the foray perhaps than any of the other writers.

But brother Bales has done enough reviewing for now. We promised to go the year and we have. If we tried it longer, the law of maximum returns would effect us.

And we do want to commend Prof. Bales for his willingness to do this kind of thing. He wrote and wrote and wrote, which was a lot of work. He made many points that drew replies from the essayists. All this helps us to understand better. We thank him. And of course we are grateful to all the essayists for their cooperation. We have all succeeded in a dialogue far too rare in our time.

We thought the spirit shown between brother Bales and his respondents was good. It is heartening that the essayists recognized brother Bales as a brother and treated him as such. While we regret that he did not once refer to any of them as brother, he was courteous and did not indulge in innuendo.

We hope you enjoyed it or got mad at it—or something.