Parabola's Spring 1986 issue: The Witness The word "witness" in the sense used by the courts and by lawyers is as dichotomous, and in the same way, as in the most fundamentalist Christian sect. It means both observer and reporter, and imparts two distinct duties. From witness-as-observer we demand (or should) the capacity to perceive; a capacity distorted, in all of us, by opinions and conditioning, limited by inattention. From witness-as-reporter we call for commitment and courage to speak out; and what lawyer has not had someone sidle up to him in the supermarket and advise, side-mouthed, that they know of facts in a case that would "blow them out of the water," but "don't ask me to testify"? That we as a nation have a Federal Witness Protection Program, which in some cases provides virtually lifetime bodyguard services for witnesses in certain gangland and racketeering cases, attests to the fact that the commitment and courage can be at the risk of life itself. There is also another danger in the difficulty of expressing, and conveying exactly to others, even what one may have clearly seen--a risk to truth, less visible than the risk to one's physical life but certainly no less real to a lover of the truth; and who but lovers of the truth can be valid witnesses? --from "And Nothing but the Truth" Cover: "Buddha's Footprints," India, 1979. Photograph by Linda Connor. In this issue:

• "Looking Through the Wall: A Meditation on Vision" by Richard R. Niebuhr
  - Varieties of decisive moments
• "The Unsleeping Eye" by P. L. Travers
  - A fairy tale
• "You Are My Witnesses" by David H.C. Read
  - The impact of belief
• "Science and Tradition" by Basarab Nicolescu
  - A new paradigm
• "The Silent Guide"
  - An interview with Father Bede Griffiths
• "Shahadah" by Victor Danner
  - The Sufi testimony
• From Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortv°zar - Fiction from a forthcoming book
• "And Nothing but the Truth" by Thomas A. Dooling
  - Courtroom conundrums
• "The Witness Within" by Padma Perera
  - Levels of presence

Tangents - Reviews

• "Being Straight with the Medicine" by Thomas Buckley
  - A review essay of Warren L d'Azevedo's book

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "The Emperor's New Clothes" / Hans Christian Andersen
• "Turncoat" / Bakongo
• "The Wall of Mystery" / Sufi
• "Mr. Fox" / British
• "The Cedar Tree" / Mohawk
• "Sir Launcelot's Dream" / Arthurian
• "The History of Susanna" / Apocrypha
• "The Seven Mateinnu" / Lenape