[67.2] MAKING PEACE ON TERRORISM?

In the wake of the horrors of Beslan prayer and silence feels the best course... But as the tragedy unfolded I was working on a long-overdue column for the Ekklesia site. It's called 'Making peace on terrorism?'...

' “To clutch at everything or to throw away everything is the reaction of those who [whether they know it or not] believe fanatically in death.”

'So declared Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who faced the horrors of Nazism without ducking or diving – and who paid the price with his life.

'Sadly, ‘clutching’ and ‘throwing’ seems almost all we are habituated to do as the latest example of the awful logic of terrorism stares cruelly out of our TV screens in those unforgiving scenes of carnage from Beslan.

'When upwards of 350 people, many children, are killed through a school hostage stand-off in a once obscure border town, no-one knows quite what to think anymore.

'The numbing heartlessness of tactics like this also anaesthetises rational thought among politicians and sensible debate in the popular media.' More here.

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