Beckwith noted recent anniversary coverage of the July 12-16 violent events in Newark and wrote that "I believe that the violence of 1967 emerged from a toxic combination of fear and frustration."
 
"The fear was of the other -- separated by race and culture and history, and an insidious legal and economic system that was organized to maintain the separation," Beckwith wrote. "The frustration boiled over as more and more people felt that there was no way to break through the fear, and fear's manifestation of racism, economic inequality and the devil knows what else."

Beckwith warned that most people know violence is a "disease that needs curing," but said it is perhaps less obvious for people to realize "that we have been taught -- for at least a millennium, that violence is the cure to the disease."

"We retaliate. We punish. We seek vengeance -- done with permission and in the expectation that it will make things better," he wrote. "It doesn't."

The bishop wrote that while he has never engaged in physical violence, "verbal violence is a different matter."

"I don't know if I have ever verbally trashed anyone, but I have filleted a few people over the years," he wrote. "I have done it because other people do it.  I have done it because, for a moment or two, it made me feel good."

Noting that "violence was official policy in the Roman Empire," Beckwith invoked the example of Jesus' response.

"Yet instead of tapping into the rampant fear and frustration felt by the many recipients of Roman violence and using it as a basis for a violent counterinsurgency, Jesus employed the God-given gifts of wisdom and love," he wrote. "Drawing on the witness of the Hebrew prophets, and in confidence of his deep and abiding relationship with God, Jesus stepped in between violence and the victims of violence. And his presence in that dangerous place has been our ticket to freedom ever since -- because it set us free from the need to engage in physical or verbal retaliation."

The complete text of Beckwith's letter is available here.

Coverage of the Newark violence is available from the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper here and National Public Radio here.