In this searing work Marc Ellis asks whether Christianity and Judaism are irredeemably scarred by tragic violence, vengeance, repression, and war. Or can genuine, life-giving elements in these traditions renew them and halt the cycle of violence? Is there God beyond violence? Ellis's personal quest for religious integrity in face of evil leads him to probe religious dimensions of both historical and contemporary eruptions of barbarism, to assess the work of prominent reformist theologians, and finally to examine what, in all honesty, we can still affirm about God.