Most talk about world peace bores me, and most anti-war activism strikes me as psychologically and historically naive. I’m not sure what’s worse — listening to the generals and politicians defend nuclear weapons or listening to generals and politicians being blamed for them. The roots of human aggression go so much deeper than the current debate suggests, and more mindless slogans are hardly the way to deal with the unconscious myths that have caused us to make war for centuries.

What I would like to share with you is something very simple but also very difficult: simple things often are. It is an invitation to pay the price for peace. We all know that peace is an exceedingly high good. But for an exceedingly high good we should expect to have to pay an exceedingly high price. I would like to explore with you what the price of peace is, and then to suggest why, in my opinion, the only force in human life that can generate enough energy to pay that price is religion. Obviously, to do this we will have to redefine religion a bit and look at what it is that makes religion religious, because it is by no means automatically religious. In fact, I tend to think it is automatically irreligious unless we do something to make it religious.