A Vatican official said the photographs were "a more serious blow to the United States than September 11." But some religious leaders said the pictures of abuse were far less brutal than the beheading of an American citizen by a militant Muslim group.
The photographs from Iraq have raised many religious and moral questions, and we want to discuss them with Reverend Barbara Lundblad, an evangelical Lutheran pastor and associate professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Reverend Lundblad, welcome. As a Christian pastor, what do you see in the prison abuses?
Reverend BARBARA K. LUNDBLAD (Associate Professor of Preaching, Union Theological Seminary, New York): Well, I see the same disgust I think that many people felt. But particularly, I felt a sense of shame that I was even looking at these pictures and that it had been done to other human beings. It was treating the other as less than human that I think was so much what I would call "sin." Demeaning other people -- humiliating them -- and then the sense of arrogance in some of the pictures where people were doing a kind of "thumbs up" became a metaphor to me, Bob, of the kind of arrogance that we've had as a country in this whole war, and disdain that we have for the Red Cross, for example, the international community. And I think this has to be named really as sin and also arrogance.ABERNETHY: Many people see the prison abuses as awful, as you do, but perhaps a necessary means to get information to help fight terrorism. Also, it's said brutal means are necessary to combat an enemy brutal enough to cut off an American prisoner's head. How do you respond to those arguments?
Rev. LUNDBLAD: It's very hard to do, but I think this is -- if you're asking me what is the heart of the tradition, the Christian tradition, that has to be as important to me as those kinds of arguments that anything goes now because we have been treated so brutally ourselves.
Rev. LUNDBLAD: Oh, I think it surely teaches us that we have to come to a time of confession -- as a people, as Christians in churches. And I hope this happens widely now across the United States. Just yesterday I read something I'd forgotten from Rabbi Heschel, who said, "In a free society, some are guilty and all are responsible." So that includes me. And it includes you. We have to find a way in our worship not to do things the way we've been doing them. It can't be worship as usual the next Sunday and the next Sunday. We have to confess and lament and really lift up all of the feelings that are inside of us and to ask God to please forgive us for this.
Read the 
