Osama bin Laden is dead. Many Americans have greeted this news with celebration and, like the president, with homage to American patriotism and national unity.

Yet what is it exactly that so many Americans are celebrating and marking as a national achievement? That may seem to be a stupid question. Television anchors, commentators, and the crowds that gathered at the White House and elsewhere know what his death means: this is the man who orchestrated the killing of thousands of Americans on September 11, 2001, a day that spawned the “War on Terror” and brought still more deaths and wounds to Americans.

For President Obama and nearly every other public voice heard so far, this is a moment, as he put it, for Americans to “give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals” that made this happen and for Americans to “feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.” It is a moment to “think back on the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11” and understand “today’s achievement” as “a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people”—national qualities, Obama continued, that remind us “that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” which for Obama includes expanding prosperity, civil rights, and American influence abroad “to make the world a safer place.” But, Obama urged in closing, “Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Such expressions of satisfaction, exultation, and national unity at our “achievement” in killing Osama bin Laden are unnerving and chilling. I am not mourning the loss of bin Laden. I am not calling into question those Americans—especially families and friends bereft at the casualties of 9/11 and the ensuing wars—who may feel consolation at his death or use it as an occasion to reflect upon the harsh realities of American national security.

I am offended, however, at the suggestion that any American would take satisfaction in America’s proficient killing units. I am disturbed by references to the unity “that prevailed on 9/11,” a unity that accelerated a preemptive war in Iraq. I am dismayed that the killing of another human being—even Osama bin Laden—warrants songs of “God Bless America” and presidential reminders that “we can do these things” ultimately because of “who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I prefer an America that experiences moments of unity without waving a bloody shirt. I prefer an America that does not invoke God so easily both out of respect for the millions in this country who do not identify with the Christian God and out of recognition of the dangers bred by self-righteous claims to God’s favor. The life and death of Osama bin Laden ought to have taught us that much.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College at Boise State University. His recent book, “Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), received the American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize.

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Originally broadcast July 2, 2010

PAMELA GREENBERG (Poet and writer, The Complete Psalms): I began the translation at a very dark time in my life. I came to religion as an adult really as an act of desperation. I felt I needed to believe in something, and I struggled with depression. I had an intuition that in the psalms I would find something of the relationship to God that I was looking for.

The psalms are full of longing for God, a longing to experience God more intimately. I think mostly for Christians the psalms represent exactly what they do for Jews, which is the person of faith standing up in relation to God in a very honest and genuine way, and I think in that way they speak to all of us.

The great thing about the psalms is that they address really the whole spectrum of human emotion, from intense despair and feelings of abandonment by God, feelings of betrayal by humankind, fear of mortality, to great joy and jubilance.

(reading from translation of Psalm 23): “And when I walk through the valley overshadowed by death, I will fear no harm, for you are with me.”

In translating Psalm 23, I was very aware that it is the psalm that people are most familiar with, and so I wrestled with it. It seemed to me to be a psalm that addressed the fear of mortality, and it’s about death but it’s really for the people who are living, and it’s also about the kind of spiritual death that we experience in our lives, distance from God.

The psalms are very important to people who are suffering, because illness can leave us feeling very distant and cut off from God, and for people to feel that there’s a way to talk to God, even from those periods of intense, almost unbearable torment was very transformative.

To my mind, anger at God is a part of religious life. In Psalm 39, for instance, the psalmist is saying, “I am getting ready to walk away from you. My interaction with you brings only pain and sorrow. Answer me before I leave.” And to me that’s religious speech.

I did wrestle with, I would say, particularly with the concept of the enemy in the psalms. Psalm 109, verse 8, which is a psalm that wishes destruction upon the enemy in very vivid terms, and that kind of thing terrifies me. You do find within the psalms wishes for revenge upon the enemy. In my understanding, those expressions are really meant to diffuse the kind of human anger that we experience by articulating them, by placing that revenge in the hands of God rather than in human hands.

The psalms are very much concerned with justice, while at the same time looking around the world and seeing the injustice of the world and crying out to God saying, “God, you who created the heavens and earth, why can’t you create justice on earth?”

The psalms that praise God are also important because they situate joy within the context of a relationship with God, which makes joy more than simply moments of happiness within a person’s life. But it sort of gives joy more of an eternal context.

The ending of the Book of Psalms is a crescendo of praise. The very last psalm, Psalm 150: “Praise God with cymbals that ring loudly. Praise God with cymbals that come crashing down. Let everything that breathes praise God. Shine forth your praises on God.”

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Watch more of producer Susan Goldstein’s interview about the psalms with poet and writer Pamela Greenberg, whose new book, The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation (Bloomsbury, 2010), is being praised for its literary beauty.

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As a theological ethicist who subscribes to all the criteria of the just war tradition—the version Mennonite pacifist John Howard Yoder said has “teeth”—I was critical from the outset of the US-led war in Iraq. In the seven years since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I have regretted that perhaps just war ethicists, including myself, did not do enough to oppose it, especially if we really regarded it as an unjust war.

What does it mean now to say the war is at an end? “End” can mean “stopped” or “concluded,” but it is important that Christians and others, for whom just war continues to be a valid moral approach to dealing with serious threats to innocent human lives, recover another understanding of what “end” means. The end, understood in the just war sense of “purpose” or “goal,” should be, as St. Augustine taught, tranquillitas ordinis or “tranquil order”—a just and lasting peace, a genuine peace that is more than merely the absence of war.

Such a peace should be restorative for all affected by the war. President Obama observed that around the world today “old adversaries are at peace,” and I suspect he had in mind US friendships with Germany, Italy, and Japan. He said our combat mission is ending, but “our commitment to Iraq’s future is not,” and he emphasized at the same that we are now also trying to build for our nation “a future of lasting peace.” That involves refocusing attention on the US economy, and it will include providing health care, education, and employment for returning US military personnel. All of this is congruent with a just war meaning of “the end.” Much of it, however, should have been in our sights from the very outset of the war.

The president referred to “lessons learned.” One lesson those who subscribe to the just war criteria should have learned is that just war categories need to be longitudinally extended to include postwar justice. Even if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were just, more needs to be done to guide us to put in motion the ingredients for a just and lasting peace. On the flip side, if a war is unjust because the criteria for going to war and for conduct during war were not satisfied, then the duty to establish postwar justice is all the more imperative, even though that won’t retroactively make it a just war.

One postwar criterion would be the principle of restoration, including restoration of public services such as the police: before embarking on war, make sure appropriate plans, equipment, and personnel are ready and in place to restore law and order on the streets and in the communities of the defeated nation. In his speech President Obama mentioned that US troops “shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people [and] trained Iraqi Security Forces.” Such a shift would not have been necessary had the Bush White House not denied in June 2003 the Department of Justice’s recommendations for an International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program, which called for the deployment of over 6,600 international police advisers, consisting of trainers for police academies, plus armed international constabulary units with 2,500 more personnel to help coalition military forces restore stability in Iraq (see “The Police in War: Fighting Insurgency, Terrorism, and Violent Crime” [Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010] by David H. Bayley and Robert M. Perito). Meanwhile, there were looters raiding homes, businesses, and museums; Iraqis were killing Iraqis; government buildings were ransacked and burned. Many scholars in other fields—including security policy experts such as Graham Day and Rama Mani—highlight the crucial role police (as well as courts and prisons) play in the transition from war to a just peace. Oftentimes the police of the defeated country disband during the war or are corrupt or implicated in the evils that led to war, so a transitional police force, accompanied by trainers, is necessary until a new force consisting of vetted, well-trained, and human-rights-respecting police is in place.

I am hopeful that progress in this connection is now underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the meantime too many persons suffered—Iraqis, Afghans, and also US military personnel—from a lack of the kind of efforts that postwar justice would require for any war to be considered just.

Tobias Winright is associate professor of theological ethics at Saint Louis University, a former law enforcement officer, and coauthor with Mark Allman of “After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post War Justice” (Orbis Books, 2010).