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Can it really be called Peace when you blow everybody up? Surely I'm not the only one to see an outright contradiction in the current US policy toward peaceful solutions in the Middle East.

On the one side is Secretary of State Colin Powell's important (but plainly naive) suggestion that peace—or perhaps he means the Bush Administration's roadmap to peace—is the only viable option left for the Israelis and Palestinians. "The alternative is what?'' Powell asked. "Just more death and destruction, let the terrorists win, let those who have no interest in a Palestinian state win, let those who have no interest but killing innocent people win? No. That is not an acceptable outcome.'' [AP, Thursday August 21, 2003 10:59 PM] So simple and honest, as if spoken by a child.

And yet on the other side is the now embittering struggle in Iraq, with the US planning to win peace through more intense warfare. Over 130 US soldiers have been killed since the May 1st declaration that major combat operations in Iraq were over. The US is now entrenched in a guerilla war. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has said that Iraqi fighters would kill 365 Americans a year, and that number seems closer every day. To achieve peace in Iraq, however, the US military plans to "conduct aggressive offensive military operations to exploit and break the enemy's structure," a senior US official told ABCNews today. Said a US military commander in Baghdad: "The more they attack us, the more fighting we'll take to them."

In formal logic this violates the Principle of Noncontradiction (no statement can be both true and false). We also used to call this speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

Father, you are a great and mighty God. Help our governments to remember the lessons of our history and to appreciate the purpose of your son Jesus. Teach our representatives not to be so arrogant as to speak in one way, but doing another, for surely this not the way of truth. Help us to understand that your will is not death but life, not the darkness of hatred but the light of friendship in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

It's getting harder for me to distinguish between Alabama's Supreme Court Chief Justice, Roy Moore, and Joseph Kony, the psychopathic leader of Uganda's brutal Lord's Resistance Army.

Judge Moore, with support from D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries and Center for Reclaiming America, continues to resist the federal court-ordered removal of his 2.5 ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the judicial building—and this despite the refusal of the US Supreme Court to block its removal. Moore believes that he has been called to reaffirm the Christian roots of US law by his iconic displays of "the law God gave to Moses."

Uganda's Kony believes that God has chosen him to overthrow Uganda's government and introduce the Ten Commandments as law. Kony is as savage as the exiled former Ugandan tyrant, Idi Amin ("the butcher of Africa"), who died in Saudi Arabia last Saturday. Kony's cult recruits followers by kidnapping children, at least when it's not using machetes to hack off their ears, noses, lips, and feet. Kony's reign of terror has continued for 17 years.

As long as God's words are treated as mere icons, they will always become for men idols—whether to mock community laws (as Judge Moore has unwittingly done) or to terrorize the bodies and minds of innocent children (as Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army are doing in Uganda). This is why Moore and Kony are really one in spirit.

Notice of books received for Quaker Books for Friends: Matthew Scully's Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (St. Martin's Press).

Nightmare on Elm Street. Paul Krueger's interview on ABC's Good Morning America yesterday has left me unsettled. Krueger was a model assistant professor of education and director of the Institute for Research in Training and Development at Penn State University—good credentials, good work reputation, good prospects—and was set to take a new, better teaching position at National University in California, until the Pennsylvania parole board notified his employer that Krueger was a convicted felon, actually a triple murderer, on parole in Texas. Penn State let him go and National University rescinded its employment offer. So now he's unemployed.

According to several recent newspaper reports, his story goes something like this. In 1965, he and a teenage friend left San Clemente, California, with romantic plans to make it as soldiers of fortune in Venezuela. Near Corpus Christi, Texas, in a rented motor boat, the duo met and killed three fishermen. Krueger shot 40 bullets into the three men. He was caught, pled guilty to the three murders, and was sentenced to three concurrent life terms. In prison, where he earned his high school diploma and an associate's degree, he was a model of rehabilitation; in 1979, after 13 years in prison, the Governor of Texas paroled him. Krueger entered Sam Houston State University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and went further to earn a master's degree from California State University-Los Angeles, a Ph.D. in sociology form South Dakota State University, and an Ed.D. from the University of Southern California. He taught at Idaho State University and held a tenure-track position at South Dakota's Augustan College before taking his post at Penn State.

Despite his recovery and rehabilitation, Krueger's history will follow him wherever he goes, and in some quarters will obviously precede him. This is not unlike the disfiguring penal letters burned into the flesh by our Puritan forbears.

Dear Father, our penal system sends changed men into a pagan society that will not forgive. Please reveal to these changed men Christian communities willing both to forgive and to forget their crimes. We know that no prison term can redeem them from your judgment. Let there be for these persons a community where the Holy Spirit can effect the true and total rehabilitation which comes only with their rebirth as one of your children. In the name of our Lord Jesus we pray this. Amen.

Fahrenheit 120. The attempt by the Anti-Defamation League to discredit Mel Gibson's film "The Passion" looks suspiciously like film-burning censorship, but it's certainly much more involved than this. Passion plays will always draw out Jewish groups against them until Christians stop following the flow of bad history and appreciate the complexities of the environment in which Christ's passion takes place. I for one wish that the Passion play would one day be more useful as an evangelical device than as a contentious piece of theater.

Witness, for example, Germany's famous village Oberammergau and its once-every-decade Passion play. The Anti-Defamation League had a hand in making changes to Otto Huber's new script in 2000 and will no doubt want to have a say in the next incarnation of the play, in 2010. First performed in 1634, and now performed every 10 years, the play is a model for the passion plays as they depict the trials, suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. In the US, passion plays are performed in St. Augustine, FL; Lake Wales, FL; Atlantic Beach, NC; Gadsden, AL; Ruston, LA; Gatlinburg, TN; Bloomington, IL; Zion, IL; Spearfish, SD; and elsewhere during the Easter season, in any number of locations where Christians congregate.

We must never forget that the Passion play is first and foremost an artistic creation: Taking from the Gospels and recasting the events in a theatrical presentation, the production will always be what its creator intends it to be. The play can be accurate, surreal, polemical, creative, strange—whatever the playwright meant it to be. Who remembers Jesus Christ Superstar or The Last Temptation of Christ, and the furor these films caused? The passion over Mel Gibson's "The Passion" can seem similar to emotions over Hollywood's depiction of Asians, Blacks, Italians, Latinos, Native Americans, and other ethnic classes that have been given the short straw in many celluloid contests. The Passion play can be as genuinely inaccurate as any Hollywood western, war movie, or slice-of-life comedy, but this doesn't mean that a playwright or screenwriter can't strive to be faithful to the Gospel accounts.

What seems to bother groups like the Anti-Defamation League is not so much the play's accuracy, but rather the likely effect of Gibson's work on anti-Semitic tendencies. If all it takes is to look cross-eyed at a white supremacist to get him riled up, then of course "The Passion" is going to excite anti-Jewish sentiments. Diddling with the play will not erase this. That's why there is something disingenuous in the recent charges by Boston University's Paula Fredriksen (writing in the July 28-August 4 edition of The New Republic) and Union Theological Seminary's Sister Mary C. Boys that the script for Gibson's movie is anti-historical and anti-Semitic.

Isn't this why executioners wear shrouded hoods, after all? Who are the cast of characters in the historic passion? Jews, Romans, and other nationalities and ethnic persons in a busy, cosmopolitan city. Jesus was a Jew. His followers were Jewish. His disciples were all Jewish. It is a sad, historical accident that the medieval period of human history engendered a hatred for the very people we Christians are grafted onto. This miserable attitude has been fueled by several passages in the New Testament in which blame is both leveled and accepted. When Jesus was before Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea literally washes his hands of Jesus and lays the responsibility upon the crowd, at which moment "All the people answered, 'Let his blood be on us and on our children.'" [Matt 27:25] In Acts 5:27-32 the high priest of the Sanhedrin accuses of Peter and the Apostles of trying to make them guilty of Jesus' death, and Peter responds thus: "The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree" [Acts 5:30]. The charge that some of the Jews and some of their leaders had killed Jesus is repeated in many speeches in Acts (see 2:23; 3:13-15; 4:10-11). This is far from making Jews, as a people, responsible for Christ's passion, so stripping "The Passion" of the testimony of New Testament scripture will not change history.

As Christians, we ought to heed the words of Paul, who reminded the Roman Christians that God's choice of Israel is irrevocable and cautioned them not to be arrogant in God's grace—but rather afraid:

If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, "Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in." Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either. [Rom 11:17-21]

Mel Gibson didn't invite me to any of his screenings of his film "The Passion," so I will have to wait to see whether he is faithful to the original events, in the way our Creator originally laid it out in his script for us.

Notice of books received for Quaker Books for Friends: Michael L. Birkel's A Near Symphony: The Timeless Quaker Wisdom of John Woolman (Friends United Press) and Arthur O. Roberts' Exploring Heaven: What Great Christian Thinkers Tell Us About Our Afterlife with God (HarperSanFrancisco).