Editor James Skillen comments on the third of the Center's Guidelines for Government and Citizenship, this one on the task of citizenship. Citizenship is a life-long responsibility that requires an ability to make judgments about the well-being of one's political community and the world. And to form such judgments requires cooperative, organized efforts of research, education, argument, and action.

Harry der Nederlanden, editor of the Canadian biweekly Christian Courier, assesses the rapid “left-leaning” changes in government taking place across Latin America. He illuminates the difference between populism—some of it radical—and the older modes of socialism and communism.

Alan Storkey, a British educator, political commentator, and author (most recently of Jesus and Politics ), anticipates possible consequences of the mounting U.S. foreign debt. In terms of trade imbalances and the outright foreign acquisition of American businesses and properties that debt has grown to some $5 trillion. What will happen when the debt collector calls?

Prabhu Guptara, a business management consultant working in Switzerland, reviews Jeff Faux's new book, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—and What it Will Take to Win it Back. Guptara does not buy all of Faux's class-based analysis, but he agrees that the growing gap between the world's rich and poor is due in part to the collusion of political and business elites to set the rules of business, trade, and investment to their own advantage.

Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran with a career in the Army, is a serious critic of the Bush administration's 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS). Bacevich, now teaching at Boston University, offers his criticism in a recent article in The American Conservative magazine. The deeper background to Bacevich's critique can be found in his recent book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Bacevich's arguments are summarized here.

In his Editor's Watch, Skillen considers some of the reasons why the United States and other nations are not moving more quickly to stop the genocide taking place in Darfur. Ultimately, humanitarian intervention in places like Darfur will require significant limitations of the sovereignty of all states.