Turn the other page: a host of recent books tackles the topics of religious violence and nonviolence. What would Jesus do? These authors say he'd be creative, courageous, and compassionate.

"RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE" SHOULD BE AN OXYMORON, but ever since Cain slew Abel in a dispute over whose worship was more pleasing to God, people of all different faiths have killed in the name of religion. The attacks of September 11 and the War on Terror have forced us to look again at the disturbing ties between belief and violence, and to ask how Christians--who are called to follow the Prince of Peace--should respond to the mayhem in the world and our own hearts. How is religion--particularly our own--responsible for violence in the world, and how can we become a "peace church"? Several recent books examine these questions and offer some helpful ideas and inspiration.

How should Christians respond to terrorism? Edward LeRoy Long Jr. offers three options in a timely and lucid little book called Facing Terrorism: Responding as Christians (Westminster John Knox, 2004). We can take up war against terror in a military crusade to vanquish terror by force. We can work with other nations and international organizations in a law enforcement approach that treats terrorism as a criminal activity. And/or we can take a peacemaking path that seeks to understand and address the causes of terrorism and to work toward reconciliation with our enemies.

Long favors a combination of the law enforcement and peacemaking approaches, and divides his short book into chapters examining the nature and causes of terrorism and warning of the dangers of an overzealous crusade that violates justice and provokes greater violence. A Christian response to terror must acknowledge the violence in our own hearts and history and seek reconciliation with those trying to provoke us to graver violence.

In the wake of 9/11 many Westerners and Christians pointed accusing fingers at the violence of Islam and the Qur'an, but Catholic biblical scholar John J. Collins argues in Does the Bible Justify Violence? (Augsburg Fortress, 2004) that the problem of religiously inspired violence is not peculiar to Islam. The Bible also portrays God as violent and as commanding us to slaughter the Lord's enemies, and down through the ages more than a few Jews and Christians have found biblical support for their violence.

In scripture God commands the Hebrews to annihilate the Amalekites (1 Samuel) and Canaanites (Joshua) inhabiting the Promised Land, and later generations of Jews saw this "ban" as justifying the Maccabean revolt and the "zealot" rebellions of Jesus' day, while Christians have used these texts to justify the Crusades, the wars of religion after the Reformation, and the colonial slaughter of indigenous peoples.

We cannot deny the violence we find in scripture, Collins argues, but we can read and interpret these troubling texts in light of the central biblical themes of compassion, repentance, and reconciliation, and we can acknowledge that these texts uncover the violence in our own hearts as well as the all-too-human tendency to project this violence onto God. Collins also warns that the heart of religious violence is to be found in a stubborn unwillingness to dialogue and a temptation to beat our biblical texts into spears with which to slay our opponents. We must read scripture peacefully.

But it's not only the Bible that's implicated. Christianity itself has charges to answer, and editors Kenneth R. Chase and Alan Jacobs ask Christians to look at the plank in our own eye in Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology (Brazos Press, 2003).

Several essays in this thoughtful examination of conscience take a long look at violent episodes in Christian history, the Crusades, the colonial conquest and slaughter of native peoples, the enslavement oftens of millions of Africans, and the Shoah. How did Christians justify, tolerate, or! oppose this violence? And what can we learn about ourselves and our vocation to peace from these episodes?

Other probing essays look for links between Christian theology and violence or peace. Richard Mouw asks whether the Christian theology of atonement (how Christ's death reconciles us to God) has supported the notion of a violent God who must be appeased by human sacrifice, while Glen Stassen and Stanley Hauer was examine ways in which Jesus' life and preaching lead us to take up the path of peace-making and nonviolence.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink believes Christians have a vocation to nonviolence, a calling most of us ignore or misunderstand. He is also convinced nonviolence is more powerful and successful than we are taught to believe. In Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way (Fortress Press, 2003), Wink denies that nonviolence is merely a passive response to evil, describes many successful nonviolent movements in scripture and history, and argues that Jesus' command not to resist the evildoer (Matt 5:39) is actually a call not to use evil (or violent) means in resisting evil.

According to Wink, Jesus commands us to struggle for justice without turning to violence. Rather than fleeing or fighting the forces of injustice, Jesus models a "third way," involving courageous, compassionate, and transformative acts that take a stand against evil without succumbing to hatred or violence. By turning our cheek, handing over our cloak, or walking the extra mile, we uncover, challenge, and ridicule the injustice and oppression of our opponents without imitating their violence or forgetting their humanity.

Given our current foreign policy and military budget, nonviolence does not seem like a particularly American notion. But Ira Chernus has written the history of nonviolence as it has evolved in this most Christian and violent of nations, and American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (Orbis, 2004) makes it clear that a steady stream of non-violent voices and movements have consistently engaged and challenged the dominant forces of violence in American society and continue to do so today.

Chernus introduces us to a chorus of nonviolent voices that includes Anabaptists and Quakers wrestling with issues of participation in American society and abolitionists struggling against the temptation to use force in the fight to end slavery. We also meet individuals like Henry David Thoreau, who embraced and defended civil disobedience as a form of nonviolent resistance, and Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose writing and activism shaped the practice and understanding of nonviolence in the 20th century. In all of this, Chernus argues persuasively that nonviolence, while nearly always a dissenting opinion, remains a vibrant and necessary idea in the American imagination.

Anyone looking for a clear, concise treatment of Catholic teaching on violence and non-violence should pick up Thomas Massaro, S.J. and Thomas Shannon's Catholic Perspectives on Peace and War (Sheed & Ward, 2003). An update of Shannon's earlier work, the book offers a history of early Christianity's pacifist stance and the subsequent rise of the just war tradition before moving into a thorough and sweeping survey of recent and contemporary Catholic thought and teaching on issues of war and peace.

Catholic Perspectives reviews and explains a variety of modern developments and issues in Catholic teaching on war and peace, including obliteration bombing, conscientious objection, nuclear deterrence, humanitarian intervention, the War on Terror, and America's "preventive" war against Iraq. In doing so, the authors explain the historical and political setting in which these issues arose and lay out the theological and ethical arguments used to examine and judge them. It's an excellent short course on the subject.

But how would you bring Christian teaching on peace into the classroom? J. Weaver and Gerald Biesecker-Mast asked the faculty of Bluffton University, a Mennonite school, how they teach nonviolence in their various courses. The result is Teaching Peace: Nonviolence and the Liberal Arts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), a collection of essays mostly by Bluffton faculty who are trying to teach peace (or teach peacefully) in a variety of academic disciplines.

After a set of essays examining the nature and theology of violence and nonviolence, some very creative and courageous professors of history, literature, math, biology, criminal justice, and communication (to name but a few) offer suggestions about how to teach peace and nonviolence in unexpected places and ways. Some explore the importance of a "peaceful classroom" and the need for just and liberating practices in the treatment of students while others try to figure out what math or biology has to do with peace.

The Jesuit activist John Dear has been teaching peace for years, writing and editing books on peace and nonviolence, leading and working with groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and engaging in nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience that have put him in prison. His most widely read text, Living Peace: A Spirituality of Contemplation and Action (Doubleday, 2001) is both an autobiography of his journey to nonviolence and an inspiring guide and invitation for those who will come after him.

For Dear the path of nonviolence is both prayerful and political, and requires several practices that will keep our hearts and minds peaceful. So this manual for peacemakers offers a series of meditations divided into what Dear refers to as the depths, heights, and breadth of peace. In "The Inner Journey" he introduces us to the prayerful solitude that opens us to the God of peace and compassion. In "The Public Journey" this God then leads us to take stands in solidarity with the victims of violence and injustice. And in "The Horizons of Peace" Dear schools us in the love, forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope we will need for the journey.

Forty-four years ago the trappist monk and best-selling author Thomas Merton attempted to teach his own generation something about peace, but his religious superiors found Merton's text too troubling and commanded him not to publish his work on nuclear weapons and war. Even in the years that followed, as Pope John XXIII and Vatican II said many of the things that Merton was forbidden to utter, the monk and his book were kept silent.

Now, in an age when the Cold War and the Soviet bloc have been replaced by the War on Terror and the axis of evil, Merton's Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Orbis, 2004) has finally seen the light of day, and though much has changed since 1961, much abides.

Reading Merton's critique of America's nuclear strategy and readiness to use weapons of mass destruction against cities has an unsettling familiarity to a generation that has witnessed the massive bombings of Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq again, or the deaths of hall a million Iraqi children from economic sanctions, as does his critique of our complacent obedience to civil leaders and our stubborn unwillingness to see the violence in our own hearts and society.

Like an Old Testament prophet whose voice rings across the sands of time, Merton's call to become peacemakers in a violent world is still as fresh and disturbing as the morning headlines.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.