In one of her meditations, the poet and essayist Fanny Howe conjures the ghost of King Midas. You no doubt remember the legendary head of state whose curse materialized with an answered prayer. The power of his touch became absolute, and his fingertips commanded the ordinary into gold. Howe encourages us to take a closer look at the king with the omnivorous appetite. His wish is not simply the expression of greed, but bespeaks a more serious and commonplace obses-sion. He reached for a world that his touch would transform and render solid, predictable, and fixed in its splendor. His love aimed at global stability, and his attachments became irrevocably binding. Only when he saw his dinner congeal into rock-solid nuggets and his daughter metastasize into a golden statue did he realize that he had erased his future.

Our tendency is to diagnose dysfunctional spiritual com-mitments and restrict our attention to the fanatics and fundamentalists whose extremism allows for no dissent and no diversity. The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies has developed a variety of programs this past year that address the entanglement of religion and violence. Without minimizing the dangers of the militant fringes within Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, we provide a meeting ground where we can discover how we appear through the eyes of our neighbors. We bring people face to face so that they can take the measure of their most ancient desires and can examine where and how their most enduring dreams are established on the ground. This inquiry brings Christians and Jews into the presence of a disturbing reality.

The violence that all too often finds authorization in religion is woven into the texture of our own religious traditions and emerges at least in part from a natural and seemingly benign impulse: the hunger for stability and permanence. To be sure, there are voices within both Judaism and Christianity that con-test our rationalizations for domestic and international force. We engage in war and dispense "justice" only when we are armed with moral and theological justifications. The impetus is fortified by the desire to eliminate confusion, disagreement, ambiguity, and uncertainty. More often than not, bloodshed flows from noble intentions and utopian dreams of a new global order. When the ICJS brings Jews and Christians together, we create an environment where we struggle not to repeat the sin of King Midas. We offer members of our community an opportunity to challenge one another and to assess how a democratic society is best ordered. We discover that there are numerous occasions when Jews and Christians handle their traditions in ways that turn mystery into stone. The ICJS is the place where solid tablets are broken and the letters of holy words escape containment -- a rare setting where Jews and Christians learn how to grip, ever so lightly, the fluid of a living tradition.