In the 1980s, under the direction of president Franklin Thomas, the focus of gender was placed onto all Ford grants and program officers were instructed to examine each and every proposal for its gender component. This moved the funding of women’s studies and other feminist enterprises from a women-specific grant category into all funding categories. By 1985, Ford had established the Women’s Program Forum, a consortium of grantmakers and Ford staffers tasked with keeping tabs on funding decisions being made worldwide on behalf of women’s issues.

The creation of the Campus Diversity Initiative in 1990 took Ford in the direction of curriculum change. The grants given from this category are directed to sex-specific academic programs and departments in addition to other identified victim class groups. Of course, sex-specific really means women’s studies—no Ford executive would ever consider white male students in need of anything other than sensitivity training.

One outgrowth of this effort was the Women’s Studies Area and International Studies Curriculum Integration Project (WSAIS), coordinated through the National Center for Research on Women (NCRW), which has been lauded by feminists as spurring the growth of women’s studies from classes about women to viewing all issues through the prism of gender. The NCRW described the WSAIS project as seeking to infuse gender concerns into international and area studies, and to internationalize the women’s studies curriculum. Ford was instrumental in taking women’s studies from the fringe and making it inescapable for faculty and students alike. The promotion of feminist ideology made possible by Ford on everything from privacy issues to ridiculous sexual harassment charges oozes through the entire university.

Ford actively seeks to transform curriculum to impose this feminist ideology onto all areas of study, including the hard sciences. Heather MacDonald’s 1996 article on Ford outlines the profound impact Ford has had on what she calls “academic ghettoization.” Not only did Ford create African-American studies (first known as Black studies) and women’s studies, but it spearheaded a movement followed by all foundations called “curriculum transformation.” This movement seeks to inject race, gender and sexual consciousness into every academic department and discipline. It gave rise to courses that, for instance, studied the misogyny in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or the feminine ways of analyzing cellular metabolism. The concept is that every discipline, every administrative function and every pedagogy was designed by an oppressive patriarchy and must be reformed.

Funding of women’s studies is complicated to track down because checks are cut to the university, not the individual program. The foundation is a major donor to the National Women’s Studies Association housed at the University of

Maryland. This is a membership organization for women’s studies programs directors, faculty, students and individual researchers. It hosts an annual Women’s Studies conference and an e-mail network with Ford monies.

In 2001, Ford gave the University of Maryland a $50,000 grant to host a conference on the development of doctoral programs in women’s studies. Although the grant is listed for the university, it is clear that the conference was developed and hosted by the women’s studies association.

Rutgers University is a frequent recipient of Ford women’s studies money. In recent years, it has received $300,000 for support of women’s globalization human rights leadership; $100,000 for studying race and gender discrimination in major business publications; a $500,000 endowment for the university’s Institute for Women’s Leadership; $100,000 for Rutgers students involved with the U.N. Beijing Conference on women; $320,000 for the Rutgers Center for the American Woman and Politics; and $346,000 for the Institute for Women’s Leadership to examine faculty’s role in initiating and supporting programs to advance diversity in higher education policy and practice.

Smith College received $259,100 in 2003 for archival preservation of the collected works of Gloria Steinem and for an oral history project on feminism and related collection development. Smith also received $210,000 for Meridians, an interdisciplinary journal of scholarship and creative writing by and about women of color and Third World women.

Other Ford women’s studies favorites in 2003 were the University of Arizona, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Minnesota, Wellesley, Radcliffe (which has three women’s studies centers) and Harvard. Most recently, the Ford Foundation has been instrumental in establishing women’s studies programs at historically Black universities with Spelman and Edgar Mevers universities leading the way. Combining women’s studies with other ethnic studies is an attempt to solidify their hold on the diversity angle. In 1995, Ford gave the University of Maryland $250,000 for a three-year seminar looking at “The Meanings and Representations of Black Women and Work” which was co-led by the director of the women’s studies program and the director of the Afro-American studies program.

Ford often expands its vision through multi-year endowments. By creating a new program for a university and then funding it for the first three to five years, Ford can provide “guidance” in curriculum development and faculty training. For example, the Harvard women’s studies program was essentially created by Ford. To expand the influence of that program into other areas of the university, in 1998 Ford established a three-year $500,000 endowment to support

women’s studies in religion at the Harvard Divinity School.

Ford created the vehicle for women’s studies to grow into other parts of the academy by its generosity to women’s research centers. Women’s research centers are more comprehensive than women’s studies programs. “Women’s research centers are essential because they’re interdisciplinary,” said Susan B. Carter, associate professor of economics at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. “We can’t understand the changes for women in the economy and the workplace without also understanding child-rearing, family patterns, psychological changes and historical forces.”

In 1972, Myra Strober became the first woman hired as an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and she and a group of colleagues applied for and got a $25,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to look into establishing a women’s research center. It was followed by a $100,000 grant for a five-year startup; Stanford matched the funds, and in 1974 the Institute for Research on Women and Gender became the first university-sponsored think tank for U.S. women. As Strober recounted in a recent article, the Ford Foundation “not only gave us money, but told me how as an assistant professor with zero power I could go to the provost and convince him that the university had to make a permanent commitment to this, one of the first centers for research on women.”

By 1981, there were 29 women’s research centers in the U.S.; today there are more than 60 university-based centers. Ford has also supported independent women’s research centers that can serve to coordinate the research and the political activism of the university-based centers. Ford endowed the Ms. Foundation with $4.5 million in 1993 to hand out to women’s research projects. In 1999, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation received a four-year $250,000 endowment to support women’s studies programs. Woodrow supports the research of faculty members to promote its liberal vision on college campuses.

The International Center for Research on Women received a $1 million endowment in 1997 for a five-year program to launch women’s studies in other countries. The foundation has invested millions to establish women’s studies in China, Israel and several South American countries, thereby expanding the reach of liberal feminism and solidifying its death grip on UN conferences addressing women, children, health and population issues. Thanks to the Ford Foundation, there are already 400 women’s organizations and 55 women’s studies programs in Brazil alone.

Why be concerned?

Women’s studies and its advocates are a clear and present danger to academic freedom and legitimate scholarship. In a 1992 article for The New Republic, author Christina Hoff Sommers related what really goes on when the National

Women’s Studies Association gets together. She wrote, “Ouchings and mass therapy are more the norm than the exception in academic feminism. Last year, at a meeting of Women’s Studies Program Directors, everyone joined hands to form a ‘healing circle.’ They also assumed the posture of trees experiencing rootedness and tranquility. Victim testimonials and New Age healing rituals routinely crowd out the reading of academic papers at NWSA conferences. Out of approximately 100 workshops and presentations at the Austin meetings, I counted no more than sixteen that could generously be called scholarly.”

Aside from behavior that most Americans would likely characterize as just plain wacky, Sommers nailed the real reason we should all be concerned about the incredible growth of women’s studies on campus: “These women run the largest growth area in the academy, and they have strong influence in some key areas, most notably in English departments (especially freshman writing courses), French departments, history departments, law schools, and divinity schools. They are disproportionately represented in the dean of students’ office, in the dormitory administration, in the harassment office, and various counseling centers. They are quietly engaged in hundreds of well-funded projects to transform a curriculum that they regard as unacceptably ‘androcentric.’ Their moral authority comes from a widespread belief that they represent ‘women.’ In fact, their version of feminism falls short of being representative.”

Women’s studies courses are designed to compel students into taking their newfound revelations and putting them into the service of politics.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, founder of the Emory University women’s studies program in the mid-1980s was forced out in the early 1990s because she refused to allow the program to be used for political purposes. What was her “sin?” She refused to send a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 placing the Emory program on the list of opposition to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. She stated, “I don’t take political positions for the program.”

As she resigned, Fox-Genovese expressed concern about the direction of women’s studies programs. Speaking about the internal struggle in women’s studies, she explained that “The battle against the conservatives was much easier to win…But the battle against the radicals is much harder, it’s pervasive. The tendency in women’s studies is towards politicization. It isn’t necessary, but it’s natural. It’s the path of least resistance, and it’s fairly widespread throughout the country, because it’s so easy to assume that women’s studies is really going to be feminist studies, that its main purpose is ideological, not intellectual.”

As if to prove that Fox-Genovese’s concerns fell on deaf ears, Vivian Ng, the president of the National Women’s Studies Association declared to a 1993 audience, “I do

political work, both inside the classroom and outside it.” Ng went on to say that student resistance can be expected, but “I’m doing political work…My students came around and I converted them.”

Former women’s studies professor Daphne Patai underscored the compelling evidence that the battle to retake our universities must be fought and won. She wrote in her book Heterophobia, “My own observations of students in women’s studies classes have led me to believe that years of exposure to feminist-promoted scare tactics have succeeded in imbuing many young women with a foreboding sense of living under constant threat from predatory men.”

The Ford Foundation has thus skewered not only the academy, but the lives of young women caught up in the grasp of feminist professors. Because of its vast resources, we cannot count on the Ford Foundation to reform itself in response to shifts in American public opinion or changes in political directions. The spotlight must be turned onto Ford so that all taxpayers supporting public universities and parents paying tuition can make informed decisions about the culture they want their students subjected to. The capitalism that built the Ford fortune and is now so despised by the foundation should be used to turn it away from our schools.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, February 20, 2003

Feminism and Socialism
by Carey Roberts

For the past 30 years I have followed the trajectory of feminism. Originally I was an ardent supporter of the ideology. But 15 years ago, it became clear that this religion of gender liberation had lost its moral compass.

Now, feminism has become a parody of the very ideals it claims to promote. It was this dialectic that led me to research this series of articles on Socialism and Feminism. The research has lead to these conclusions:

1. The basic premise of radical feminism is that being a wife and mother is inherently exploitative of women. This paradigm originated in the Marxist analysis of class relationships in Europe in the mid-1800s.

2. Over the past 100 years, many feminist leaders have openly aligned themselves with socialist ideology.

3. Beginning in the 1920s, socialist thinkers realized that capitalism could never be overthrown by violent means. So they conspired to undermine the values and institutions of Western society. This set up what we now call the Culture War.

4. Radical feminists have worked at the vanguard of the Culture War. Their range of tactics is astonishing: discourage women from childbearing, undermining the institution of the family, promise women equal pay for unequal work, impose gender quotas on national elections, emasculate men.

5. Both socialism and radical feminism operate through deception. While both ideologies claim to be merely working for equality, in fact they aspire to radically restructure the entire society.

So is radical feminism a socialist front? In a word, Yes.

Read just a few paragraphs from Kate Weigand’s book, Red

Feminism. Or go to the Women and Marxism website and you will see the speeches of the Communist rascals that were calculated to whip up women into a revolutionary hysteria.

The radical feminist worldview, goals, tactics, and rhetoric — all can be linked directly to Marxist-Leninist theory.

Ironically, it is doubtful that Marxism has liberated women. Modern women are no more independent than they were 150 years ago in patriarchal Europe.

Fem-socialism has only shifted female dependency to big government and to feminist Pooh Bahs who deem to dictate what women will think, feel, and do. No wonder women are feeling victimized, angry, and lonely.

So if feminist-socialist theory has failed women, where does that leave us?

Clearly, the roles of women — and men — are evolving. The answer to the age-old Woman Question is not to return to the restrictive gender roles of the 19th century.

Let’s first acknowledge the fact that life has never been a bowl of cherries — for either women or men. Both suffered terribly from abuses specific to their gender.

Let’s also note that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. The more rights any group acquires must be accompanied by a similar increase in social obligations.

And finally, let’s stop the gender epithets which have the effect of shaming and silencing men.

The myths of fem-socialism are deeply embedded in the fabric of Western society. These myths need to be exposed and debunked.

At the same time, why don’t we commence a real gender dialog in this country?

—NewsWithViews.com, January 27, 2004

The Tides Foundation
by Ben Johnson

With Matt Drudge’s recent revelation that John Kerry is as faithful to his second wife as he was to his old Vietnam “brothers,” the senator’s presidential campaign may depend more than ever on the actions of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. While the mainstream media has thus far overlooked the alleged infidelity, media outlets have also overlooked a far more important story: The former Mrs. John Heinz is also in bed – financially – with the radical Left.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has financed the secretive Tides Foundation to the tune of more than $4 million over the years. The Tides Foundation, a “charity” established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorist legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open borders advocates.

During the years 1995-2001, the Howard Heinz Endowment, which Heinz Kerry chairs, gave Tides more than $4.3 million. The combined Heinz Endowments (composed of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Vira I. Heinz Endowment) donated $1.6 million to establish the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh office of the San Francisco-based Tides Center. Since that time, the local branch has tirelessly pushed an anti-business agenda in the name of “preserving the environment.” However, it is the Tides Foundation’s national organization whose connections are most disconcerting.

The Tides Foundation is a major source of revenue for some of the most extreme groups on the Left. Tides allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a host of causes; the donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. Tides does so, for a nominal fee. Drummond Pike told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.” That becomes understandable when one views the list of Tides grant recipients. And who are the beneficiaries of this money?

The Antiwar Movement

Senator John F. Kerry has gone far with his nuanced view of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He voted for the war resolution but specified a litany of conditions the Bush administration must meet before he would support combat, then proceeded to vote against funding troops already in harm’s way – then claimed he had always supported the president when Saddam Hussein was captured. The grant recipients of the Tides Foundation, to which Kerry’s wife has steered millions of dollars in “charitable” funds, understand no such nuance.

Tides established the Iraq Peace Fund and the Peace Strategies Fund to fund the antiwar movement. These projects fueled such hysterical protest organizations as MoveOn.org, the website that recently featured two separate commercials portraying George W. Bush as Adolf Hitler. (Howard Dean, not Kerry, won MoveOn.org’s “virtual primary.”)

The antiwar movement often boasted that MoveOn.org and the radical website Indymedia provided them “alternate media coverage.” Indymedia, an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for radical activists, often with violent agendas, to coordinate their protests. Indymedia received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.

The Institute for Global Communications is another leftist communications facilitator that received Tides grant money. IGC, which during the 1990s was the leading provider of web technology to the radical Left, links to “recommended sites” such as the War Resisters League (a group whose purpose is enabling peaceniks to refuse to pay taxes) and the leftist American Friends Service Committee. Most disturbing is the link to Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, which has supported Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il. The IAC is the force behind International ANSWER, which sponsored the major antiwar (and anti-Bush) rallies before the invasion of Iraq. When ANSWER was outed as a Communist organization, United for Peace and Justice, headed by longtime Communist Party member Leslie Cagan was created as a “moderate” alternative. UFPJ is also a Tides grant recipient. The Tides-funded “A Better Way Project,” which opposed war in Iraq, also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition. The celebrity-laden Win Without War Coalition, along with the Bill Moyers-funded Florence and John Schumann Foundation, ran full-page ads in the New York Times opposing the War on Terrorism. This will not be the last overlapping of far-Left causes.

The Islamist Front

Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. Part of the half-million dollars in grants the 9/11 Fund dispersed went to the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project to protect the rights of homosexual Arabs. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Currency speculator and pro-drug advocate Soros is, like Teresa Heinz Kerry, a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.) The Democratic Justice Fund seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as “terrorist nations.”

Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations. Ostensibly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations within the Wahhabi Lobby, with links to Hamas. CAIR regularly opposes and demonizes American efforts to fight terrorism, claiming, for instance, that Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in “hate crimes.”

CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s anti-terrorism measures: all too many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorism. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad openly stated in 1994, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi has been arrested for visa and bank fraud. Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning jihad. CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration. Every few months some CAIR campus official is arrested for aiding and abetting terrorism.

The Legal Matrix

The Tides Foundation has funded a number of the pillars of the radical legal establishment. Chief among these is the National Lawyers Guild, which began as a Commnist front organization and is proud of its lineage. At its recent convention last October, the concluding speaker was Lynne Stewart, an indicted terrorist NLG lawyer arrested for helping her client – convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing

mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – communicate with his terrorist cells in Egypt. In her speech, Stewart said she and her NLG comrades were carrying on a proud tradition of their forebears, past and present: “And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us, ‘At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.’ Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.”

More recently, the NLG has endorsed the March 20 call to “End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine & Everywhere” organized by International ANSWER, and has posted a petition for “Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Tides’ Peace Strategies Fund has funneled money to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The CCR was stablished by Sixties radical William Kunstler, defender of the Chicago 8, and Arthur Kinoy. The two also had plans to establish a new Communist Party. Executive Director Ron Daniels has been honored by the Communist Party USA for his work. Daniels also has a long and cordial relationship with racist, anti-Semitic “poet laureate” Amiri Baraka. Since 9/11, CCR has channeled its efforts into fighting every effective Homeland Security measure. They have opposed increasing the government’s ability to wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and moaned the sequestering of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay was an unexcusable form of “racial profiling.” CCR President Michael Ratner has portrayed American soldiers as the offenders, guilty of 9/11 by their Middle East policy and guilty of keeping Islamist killers “shackled, hooded and sedated during the 25 hour flight from Afghanistan.” CCR has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s Islamic Jihad.

Tides also funds the Alliance for Justice, a group dedicated to stopping Bush judicial appointees (a cause John Kerry can wholeheartedly endorse). Other Tides grants have gone to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the Asian Law Caucus.

Environmental Extremism

The Tides Foundation has funded the Ruckus Society, a group of anarchist Greens who rioted and looted Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots. The Tides

Center of Western Pennsylvania, established in Pittsburgh with Heinz Family funds, advocates for environmentalist measures that have helped put holes in the Rust Belt’s economy.

Tides money has also squashed free speech. Thanks to complaints generated by the Tides-funded Environmental Working Group, ABC cancelled a John Stossel piece exposing the misleading nature of environmental advocacy in public elementary schools.

Greenpeace is a well-known Tides grant recipient. Greenpeace is best known for its illegal actions, endangering humans in order to make a point about the environment. Tides gave Greenpeace a quarter of a million dollars over ten years.

Lest one think only Tides’ money is going to radicals, not funds directly controlled by Teresa Heinz Kerry, remember that Heinz money has repeatedly found its way to the Earth Island Institute. On September 14, 2001, the Institute’s website bore the headline “U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance.”

Heinz family philanthropic funds have also had some dubious effects on the presidential race. The League of Conservation Voters has recently endorsed John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The Heinz Family Foundation gave LCV at least $20,000 and donated almost $250,000 to a member of the LCV board.

Perhaps this circular rotation of cash and endorsements should not surprise anyone. The grant-making institutions of the Left and their feverish recipients ultimately form an amorphous, leftist entity. One never needs to search very far

to find connections between a leftist foundation and extreme advocacy groups. Teresa Heinz Kerry, George Soros, Bill Moyers and the Ford Foundation fund the Tides Foundation/Center; Tides funds the National Lawyers Guild, CAIR, MoveOn.org and United for Peace and Justice; those organizations then unite in fluid coalitions to protest against their common political enemies (Republicans). Ultimately, their representatives end up on Bill Moyers’ PBS programs or active within the Democratic campaigns of their fundraisers. Between now and the election, these organizations will run constant interference for the Democratic presidential nominee (presumably Kerry himself): they will march en masse against the Bush administration again and again; they will file more lawsuits against the administration’s Homeland Security measures, decry any effective response to terrorism, claim the United States is guilty of slaughtering Iraqi civilians and petition leftist judges to open America’s borders to Islamist terrorists. After they help his election, President Kerry will be indebted to them. And then they will insist he begin implementing their political agenda.

Moreover, they will have a close ally in the East Wing of the White House, an ally more intimately tied to them than she is to her (second) husband. (She only adopted his last name and political party registration less than 18 months ago. “Politically, it’s going to be Heinz Kerry,” she recently said. “But I don’t give a sh-t, you know?”) Teresa Heinz Kerry will play a potent role in saving her second husband’s presidential campaign now – as Hillary Clinton did in 1992, and again during her husband’s impeachment. Like Hillary, in return for her service, Heinz may demand a place at the table for her pet causes. Caveat emptor.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, February 13, 2004

Letters to the Editor

Dear Drs. Schwarz and Noebel,

I gratefully receive both your Summit Journal and your Schwarz Report. The Summit is always great and your last two issues of the Schwarz Report have been uncommonly (extraordinarily, even) good, especially the November, 2003 (Vol. 43, No. 11) with its articles by Dr. Michael Ruse and Dr. Henry Morris. Coincidentally, I had just finished reading two weighty books by the same Dr. Ruse. I feel he is (if anybody can be) ‘an honest evolutionist.’ It is heartening to realize (to infer, at least) that his two books (Monad To Man [1996] and Mystery Of Mysteries [1999]) were quite possibly inspired by the challenge given to him back in the 80’s by Mr. Duane Gish (to wit: “I defy you to show any difference with evolution [i.e. as a manifestation of religious belief]”). The fact that Dr. Ruse has consented to write an article like “Evolution: Science and Religion” demonstrates the fact that his outlook is shifting (if ever so slightly) toward logic and reason. In fact, judging by his two aforementioned books I saw no indication that he would have condescended to allow a creationist group to print any article of his—even if to counterbalance Dr. Morris’ fine article. Mr. Gish (whom I read and admire as well) must have indeed planted a mustard seed of suspicion (i.e. suspicion that evolution is something less than “objective science”) that keeps growing in Dr. Ruse’s mind.

I copied your Schwarz Report November issue (I knew you wouldn’t mind), and shared it with an atheist friend of mine who teaches with me. He teaches philosophy and I teach Spanish and French (the grammars of which helped unlock for me the true

meaning of Trinity…as I/you/he (1st pers./2nd pers./3rd pers. perspective—not the tired old “body, soul, spirit”, etc) (there are 6500 languages in the world and they are all Trinitarian or 3-person languages!—but that’s another story)(I’m trying to write a book on it—but I just gotta share this one last thought: did you know what I’ve discovered? There are only two basic religions: trinitarianism and unitarianism [the latter appearing under its various names: monism, communism, Islam, evolutionism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Big Bangism, homosexualism—see the pattern: unity over diversity? etc] but I digress) The important fact to share with you today is that my atheistic friend (Dr. Bill Stone—who disagrees with my Trinity Logic Theory, of course) actually knows Dr. Ruse!! Each year these two scholars wend their separate way (Bill from Mississippi and Dr. Ruse from Ontario) to the same island off the coast of Maine where they (and others of similar inclinations) go to spend a week or so relaxing in rocking chairs on somebody’s front porch and enjoying the picturesque scenery…all the while discussing their academic [read “unitarian” {lower case “us” as I am not limiting Unitarianism merely to the Universalist Church}] pursuits.

I left the aforementioned copy of Schwarz Report under Dr. Stone’s door [along with a little introduction) just before the Christmas break. I know it will have some small impact on him at least as he respects Dr. Ruse.

Please keep up the good work. God bless you all and grant you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.

Sincerely,

Bob Craig

Dear Dr. Noebel,

My enclosed check is evidence that I have not abandoned you people. I have been very favorably impressed with your performance since you have taken over. I can’t find your title in the literature that I have, but I assume that you are at least the editor of the newsletter. I look forward to receiving each issue.

I was distress when I read the lead article in your November, 2003 issue (Volume 43, Number 11). I realize that there were other articles in that issue and several references, which point out the flaws in the theory of Evolution. I do, however, wonder why you included, in an organ of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, this article by Dr. Ruse who describes himself as “an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian”. I realize that his purpose seems to be agreeing with us that Evolution is, indeed, a religion. I don’t know Dr. Ruse’s background and training. Early in the article he modestly describes himself as “the not-so-famous—a philosophy professor from the University of Guelph” Still, he comes through, to me at least, as smugly intellectual. I don’t dismiss intellectuals, but, Dr. Noebel, I am inclined to be suspicious of them. Why? I think back to some of the giants of the conservative philosophy. People like Whittaker Chambers, and maybe Frank Meyers. (Next month I will be 83 and my memory is not what it used to be.) Anyway, I am thinking of former Communists. I thank God for their conversion and for the intellect that they bring to the table, but one question always bothers me. Viz Where was their intellect when they fell for the Communist line? I knew better than to do that when I was still in grade school.

As I said, I don’t know anything about Dr. Ruse—unless that is a tricky alias. I guess his article is not aggressively anti-Christian except he implies that we are stupid if we believe the Bible. He says “we all know the Christianity of Saint Paul was not exactly identical to the Christianity of Jesus.” I don’t know that at all. I believe that much of what Paul tells us was revealed to him by Jesus, so that Paul’s version was actually Jesus’s version. But I digress.

Here is my principal objection to Dr. Ruse’s article on the front page. I am normally ready to show the newsletter to friends to inform them and show them well written articles reinforcing my own beliefs. I would be afraid that if I gave the November 2003 issue to someone, they might read only Dr. Ruse’s article and come away with the idea that it is the position of the Newsletter that Evolution is true and Christians are on the wrong track. I hope you understand my disappointment.

Respectfully,

Ralph J. Smith