In his Afterword, Shane Claiborne (author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, and one of the three peacemakers) describes the impact of this experience and its ongoing meaning:

Now that the war in Iraq is over, history will tell how we remember it. I’m sure there will be all sorts of books on the Iraq war… But in the end, I hope that history will also remember the story of this little town called Rutba.

Greg is a twenty-year veteran of news correspondence for US wire services and newspapers. Prior to writing The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok, he was a print journalist working everywhere from small-town Loris, S.C. (earning less than $10,000 and squatting rent-free in a Myrtle Beach lifeguard house) to Augusta, GA., Rock Hill, S.C., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md., and, Honolulu, Hawaii (a haole reporting on Native Hawaiian Affairs and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation into the Bishop Estate’s mismanagement of Kamehameha Schools).

In 2000, Barrett was a national correspondent in the Gannett News Service/USA Today Washington bureau when he was sent to Thailand to investigate human trafficking. It was in those reports that he met Father Joe Maier and saw his Mercy Centre orphanages and schools. Surprised by the magnanimous Bangkok charity that lit an otherwise dark corner of the world, Barrett returned five years later to find out why the poor, abandoned, abused, HIV-infected children at Father Joe’s charity hopped, skipped, whistled and played at a clip faster than the children in his own relatively affluent cul-de-sac near Washington, D.C. The Gospel of Father Joe became his first nonfiction book.

In 2003, Barrett reported from the streets of prewar Iraq during the buildup to the US-led invasion. Seven years later, he returned to Iraq with Shane Claiborne and several other peacemakers to tell the story of how Iraqi Good Samaritans in the rugged desert town of Rutba, Iraq had helped rescue Shane and two other Americans during the Shock & Awe bombing of March 2003. His latest book, The Gospel of Rutba: War, Peace, and the Good Samaritan Story in Iraq, has been available at Amazon.com since May 23, and is now available in bookstores, too.

I’m so proud of my talented family!

I would like to thank the book’s publisher Robert Ellsberg, son of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and editor-in chief/publisher of Orbis Books, for taking Greg’s book under his wing and permitting his quote of Lazar’s lyric within its pages.