Tough Doves, Tender Warriors by: Jon Spayde A Second Season of Peace on Earth by: Andy Steiner The Enemy at the End of the Block by: Craig Cox The Freelance Peacemaker by: Roger L. Plunk Radical Compassion by: Utne Reader Winning a New Kind of War by: Mary Kaldor Discuss e-books in the Literature forum in Café Utne's: cafe.utne.com

The notice called it a 'Men’s Peace Retreat,' a half-day gathering of men, in a Unitarian church, to reflect together on personal and global peacemaking. Before September 11, 2001, I would surely have passed it by; after all, I knew the drill: good-hearted middle-class males gather, peek beneath culturally encrusted codes of stoicism and aggressive toughness, find flame of compassion, and gently fan it for a few hours. To me, such gatherings had always seemed more like rituals than catalysts for real change.

But now I needed a peace retreat, if only to figure out what peace had become.

After the World Trade Center attack, for a while, there was a strange new depth of feeling and thinking everywhere in our country—along with jingoism, scapegoating of Muslims, and other predictable pathologies. Still, this wasn’t the Gulf War; Americans seemed willing to mourn and wonder, not just hit back. Many sensed that the terrible events were a call to reflect on our role in the world and to initiate peacemaking—whatever form that might take. There was a feeling in the air that peacemaking would have to go deeper than striking at terrorist networks and the governments that shelter them.

But I could not imagine anything in the world with which I was less eager to 'dialogue' than Muslim fundamentalism. I wanted to understand Muslim anger at America. But the face it wore on September 11—'pure' Muslim martyrs, eager for alcohol, lap dancers, and credit cards, murdering thousands of innocents on a fine fall morning—was not a face into which I expected to look with compassion.

Then the postmodern 'war' began. America dumped tons of bombs on a suffering country in an attempt to destroy an odious regime that protected a millionaire terrorist. All that seemed certain was that the terrorist’s global army would survive, and that America would probably not bomb London, Hamburg, or any of the other First World cities where his cells operate. Meanwhile, the United States cemented an alliance with Pakistan, whose religious schools spawned the Taliban, and maintained its close ties with Saudi Arabia, where the Taliban’s harsh brand of Islam originated, and many of whose elite support fundamentalist terror.