The Common Predicament of Religion and Social Work.

Rapid changes have transformed certain aspects of human culture so drastically within the last half-century that very few, if any, persons have the intellectual power to comprehend the radically new situation confronting mankind. In addition, there looms the shadow of nuclear warfare. Men are frightened at this juncture in history and there is little to comfort them. Religion is now much like the sleeve of an outer garment worn thin through too much wiping of a sniffling nose. Social work has lost its lofty vision of a redeemed society and has become content with itself as a profession. Religion and social work, along with all sectors of society, have felt the challenge of the widescale unsettling. Like persons, they have been affected by this sense of alienation. They have come to realize that the traditional society which comfortably nurtured them has been transformed. Both religion and social work, then, are faced with a common predicament. The rapid cultural changes of the last decades, the rise of international threats to human existence, the decay of vital reliance upon transcendent belief systems, the rising impersonality of urbanized living, the failure of politics to win the "good life" for all peoples, the growing fragmentation of professionalism, the overpowering influence of rampant bureaucracy, and other features of an age in transition-these have created the common predicament for religion and social work.