On Sunday evening, November 9, five days after the historic 2008 election of Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States, James Carroll presented an honest appraisal of the possibilities for peace that the election represented. 225 people gathered in a sanctuary that serves as sacred space for two congregations, one Christian and one Jewish, eager for Mr. Carroll’s response to the event that had moved the world to hope. He was frank about the human propensity for violence and acknowledged that violence was at the beginning of human culture and of religious practices such as sacrificial rituals. Would the swearing in on January 20 of President Obama bring an end to violence and usher in an era of peace? He acknowledged that such an idea is naïve, more wishful thinking than reality. Yet, as he returned again and again to the violence that seems to possess the human spirit, the hope that possesses his spirit asserted itself.Following Professor Walter Burkett of the University of Zurich, Mr. Carroll explained that culture begins in the violence of the hunt and in the human response to that violence. Because our survival depends on the violence involved in killing animals for food, violence permeates the human condition and all of our institutions, including religion. Mr. Carroll wrestled with the disturbing possibility that violence may be an integral part of human nature, in us from the moment of creation. Yet also present, he insisted, was the ability of human beings to reflect on that violence and to be uneasy about it. Mr. Carroll postulated that the human conscience is the capacity to be troubled by our own violence.

Raven Foundation Founders Keith and Suzanne Ross with James Carroll 
The Bible, he said, is all about violence. He asked us to think about the biblical narrative as wartime literature yet it is not a story that glorifies war. The Bible, despite being saturated with violence, is essentially ambivalent about it. René Girard is pointing to the same thing when he calls the Bible a text in travail. What both Mr. Carroll and Professor Girard want to direct our attention to is the revelatory core of the great world religions, which is a call away from the justification of violence and toward identification with the suffering of victims. God, Mr. Carroll explained, is on the side of victim because human beings insist on seeing our victims as Other, as less than human, as deserving recipients of our vengeful retribution. When Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assert the oneness of God, it is a wholly unambivalent statement of God’s presence in and through all of creation, as present in us as in our enemies. The tremendous insight of the monotheistic religions is the removal of God from war making (gods against gods) and toward a principle of unity and nonviolence as the ground of all being.

During the question and answer period, an audience member said that he wasn’t sure how to respond to what he had heard. He felt himself undecided as to whether he should be in despair or feel hopeful. James Carroll answered that that was the perfect response. “Hope would not be hope,” he said, “if it weren’t a response to despair. Hope is a choice. Despair is a condition.” Hope is clearly the choice of Mr. Carroll and his passionate call for a rejection of violence infected his audience that night. In his Boston Globe column on November 3, the day before the election, Mr. Carroll wrote, “Everyone is asking what kind of leader our next president will be. But there is a prior question: What kind of people will we be?” We left with the unsettling realization that the reality of war and the possibility for peace are more our responsibility than we had ever realized.

Listen to Suzanne Ross interview James Carroll.