Editors ponder: Is it a wise decision to devote virtually a whole issue to a single topic? Moreover, if there is to be a single topic, dare we concentrate on something as distasteful and unsettling as violence? Should a center devoted to health, faith, and ethics come across, even for one bimonth, as preoccupied with a subject already occupying so much of the news around us and fosters the fears within us?

While so pondering, the editors might think of the way violence greets television viewers, radio listeners, and newspaper readers. Violence is associated with places such as Chechnya, Rwanda, Colombia, or Kashmir. Violence occurs when contemporary Attilas descend upon innocent villagers, when armed African pre-teens, grow up in a monolithic culture of killing. Violence threatens when nations arm themselves with nuclear weapons, lethal gas, and the biological weapons. Violence is something that one talks about when dealing with far away places, peoples, and times. Not here, not among us, not now.

So our Bulletin editors, taking the oppressiveness of the subject into account, might devote themselves to peaceful, domestic topics, such as those addressed in the previous issue. If violence is foreign, let us deal with national concerns. If it occurs among "them" in the inner city, then concentrate on "us" in suburban churches and synagogues. If it is natural on the battlefield, let us deal with the where it is unnatural—in religious congregations, for example. So we did deal with the close-to-home, in-home, near-home places, people, and times in this issue.

Yet violence remained the theme. Should it have? Certainly it will not dominate the next Bulletin. Certainly there is no evidence that the editors have acquired a taste for it, and will be advancing Vlad the Impaler as a candidate for sainthood. Why deal with it as we just have, here and now?

It happens that violence is a close-to-home, within-the-heart problem. Americans, including well-off suburban citizens, can now see that dealing with violence is a practical, as well as spiritual concern. There is no place to hide.

It may be true that media are more efficient than ever at reporting on conflict turned brutal. It may also be true that ours has become a victim culture or an abuse culture, in which more people—especially children and women—are encouraged to speak up about violence in their lives. It is true that there are more agencies set up to deal with violence, so its effects are more visible than before.

Dwelling on violence for its own sake, however, is neither part of the agenda or the set of esthetic preferences among us editors and, we presume, among most readers. We simply have come to understand what anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski observed: aggression, like charity, begins at home. Accordingly it must be dealt with at home, in congregations, and the like.

Liberal Protestants, back when they sometimes confused the Kingdom of God with Utopia and still sang "men" when they meant "people," sang a dream-hymn by Clifford Bax. The second verse is a vision of waking up:

Earth might be fair, and all men glad and wise.

Age after age their tragic empires rise,

Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep:

Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep,

Earth might be fair, and all men glad and wise.

Women and men alike find reason to wake from out their haunted sleep, to deal with the nightmares they have inspired or experienced. Learning what instruments and approaches they employ to address violence is very complex. The issue which you have just read—which we hope you will save and file and use—offers a few clues to such address. Earth might be fairer.