Dear David, My view of our affairs is admittedly affected by the geographical distance I have from them – I live in Rome – and coloured by many years’ close experience of our ecclesiastical politics. Nevertheless, when it comes to America and the Church, the ills that have befallen each have infected the other, so that anything one might say to the one body would bear on the other, for good or for ill. Many are the voices that decry the “polit­ic­isation” of our age. A natural contrarian, I should like to stake out the opposite case: it is our abhorrence of politics – our allergy, almost, to “things of the city” – that is chiefly responsible for most of our ills. That America is a “City on a Hill” is a trope older even than the Puritan settlement of our New England shores. Daniel Boorstin called the Atlantic route to the New World a “path from Babylon to Zion”, which I have taken as another way of saying that the crossing was an act of pilgrimage, one the Puritans clearly interpreted as exodus. When they got where they were going, however, they discovered “waste and howling wilderness” as Samuel Danforth rather lately put it (in 1670). So, they had not made Zion after all. At least, they’d not made it yet. The vision of gleaming alabaster cities “undimmed by human tears” continues to inform our self-understanding, but our forebears had recovered a sense of that city’s being beyond history and beyond the reach of human endeavour. I think we’ve lost that sense of being in history, and are feeling the effects of the loss the more, as we more stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it. The Puritan penchant for excluding others from society, which marked our early history, has not gone away. It merely went to ground. It emerges from time to time, and is in vogue these days, right and left. The progressive element in society, who insist they are on the right side of history, would leave their fellows behind or steamroll them if they are in the way. The conservative element – often as nostalgic for a past that never was, as their progressive fellows are pining for a future that will always elude them – will not only resist the efforts of their progressive fellows, but will treat their fellows as enemies in any case. The presumption of community is at risk of failing, in other words, and how is a national conversation to come from that? Yours, Christopher Altieri