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James Carroll is a fine man; I think of him in the tradition of the Berrigan brothers. He writes a lot of books, very successfully, as well as a column for the Boston Globe (my current home town newspaper). Carroll's most recent book is Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World. I was most recently struck by the last paragraph of Carroll's report of Defense Secretary Robert Gates's unusual talk to the cadets at West Point:
One can only be touched by the way Gates feels the burden of his role, and by how he carries the weight of the very history that might stay his sacrificing hand. But he presides at the altar of a ritual that has not changed across a century. A week before the British poet Wilfred Owen died on the Western Front in 1918, he wrote “The Parable of the Young Man and the Old.’’ The poem equates Abraham with all who preside at war, with an angel calling out to the likes of Robert Gates, whether from heaven or from history: “When Lo! An angel called him out of heaven, saying, ‘Lay not thy hand upon the lad. . .’ But the old man would not so, but slew his son — and half the seed of Europe, one by one.’’