"When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, nothing could have been further from the public mind than to forgive the action and confound the terrorists by so doing. Such a response might have done much to create the image of a United States totally different from what the terrorists contend it to be. The empathy of other nations that originally recognized the horror of those attacks and treated the United States as a victim deserving of sympathetic support might have continued. By reacting as the United States did, it has lost much of that support and even came to be viewed with increasing suspicion and concern, not only by her enemies but by some of her friends. What the truculent would regard as wimpish might have been a source of strength.

"A quiet tenacity in the face of evil — a tenacity that seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer — may have far more capacity to change the world than the wielding of the sword. This is not a popular tenet, and to suggest the possibilities that can result from dealing with evil in this way is likely to invite ridicule. Perhaps it is unpopular because it entails accepting the costs of reconciliation on the self rather than imposing them on others. But this is the paradigm according to which God deals with the world. Does this make God weak? To be sure, the cross does not furnish a success story in the ordinary meaning of the term. But what is the basis for holding that the alternative has resulted in success? In a world where violence is escalating and making ever greater numbers of people and ever larger groups more and more vulnerable to ever more horrendous possibilities of injury, what indeed is the warrant for deeming the use of violence a success story? It is highly probable that violence may be on the way to doing in the human race, not providing healing order. To seek the reversal of this scenario would not be a weakness, but a strength. That strength can only stem from an understanding of religion that is wiser than the realism of this world and braver than the heroism of the truculent."