Rev'd Up

Tutu has a lot to say. And he likes to say it. His booking agent stays busy keeping him on the speaking circuit. That is the global cleric at work, still crusading, all over the world, for there still are battles to be fought, souls to serve, in the name of his God.

One day Tutu's in Dallas speaking at a church. Then he's at Peace Jam in Denver, hangin' with the Dalai Lama and other Nobel laureates. On to New York, and Tutu's with former president Clinton and his globalistas, speaking on a panel with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Then he's home to Cape Town in time to deliver yet another speech. And that was just his September.

Tutu likens his outspokenness to that of the Old Testament's Jeremiah, perhaps the most reluctant of all the prophets. Jeremiah did not want to be what God wanted. He did not want to be a voice for God's word. But even when he did not want to speak it, God's message nagged him, like "a fire burning in my breast," so the Old Testament says. It is also the title of a chapter in the new book, for it describes Tutu's driving force. Tutu feels the fire.

"Religion is like a knife. If you use it to slice bread, it is good. If you use it to slice off somebody's hand, it is bad," Tutu said at the Global Initiative, Clinton recalled in an e-mail.

And then Clinton wrote, "We need the Bishop's voice now more than ever, to slice bread and spread love. . . . Bishop Tutu is the living answer to heretics who use faith to divide and destroy and to cynics who doubt that any good can flow from an active faith."

These days, the voice is ringing out on the war in Iraq and all its attendant issues, like detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay and, of course, torture. Tutu's criticism is not new. It's been building since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a war he has called illegal and immoral.

"And this rendition -- sending people where it will be easier for them to be tortured -- is an admission that this is something that we shouldn't be doing," he says. This he calls the "oughtness" of life, as in: We all know, morally speaking, what we ought and ought not do.

So when confronted with sectarian killing in Iraq, genocide in Darfur and torture in places unseen, "why we are appalled is precisely because we are good. If evil and wrong were the norm, there's no way in which you would get too upset about it. . . . And even the worst dictators: I've never heard them say, 'You see me? I'm a violator of human rights.' They all claim to respect human rights.

"Why do they hide it? I mean, if it was something that they said doesn't really matter, they would do it in the open. They hide it because they know it is unacceptable."

U.S. detention-without-trial at Guantanamo Bay is especially galling to him because he witnessed thousands of people, from children to the elderly, being detained without trial during the apartheid era. He says he did not believe the United States would do such a thing.

"That they should use the same arguments to justify detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government, for me, has knocked me for a six." The term is a Britishism meaning, in Tutu's words: "You are devastated and you say this can't be true. But it is."

Acts of Forgiveness

Goodness is man's basic instinct. Tutu believes this. His faith blends Christian precepts with an African conception of humanity known, in the Nguni languages, as ubuntu . It means humaneness and represents a way of perceiving community, that a person is a person through other people, that humanity resides in mutual respect and interconnectedness.