Dissenters fault reactions to attacks:

Over the course of the year, the few audible voices that publicly questioned the quasi-official narrative of Sept. 11 have been ridiculed and criticized, often harshly.

But now, a year after the attacks, a handful of scholars is once again suggesting that there are other ways of looking at what happened last year, that perhaps the attacks weren’t so shocking and the response not so justifiable.

”We academics are paid to sit on our butts and think, and yet we mainly underwrite the sentimentalities that the culture desires when we’re supposed to be telling the truth,” said Stanley M. Hauerwas, a prominent professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School. ”I find the lack of dissenting voices to the current outrage of Americans about September the 11th, and the resulting attack on Afghanistan, to be absolutely horrendous.”

Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, a professor of literature and theater studies at Duke, have edited a new collection of writings, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11, that is being published on Wednesday, Sept. 11, in a special edition of The South Atlantic Quarterly. In the journal, 18 theologians, philosophers, and literary critics speak out against the war on terrorism, led by the two Duke professors, who complain in an introductory note that ”this war has … seen the capitulation of church and synagogue to the resurgence of American patriotism and nationalism.” Boston Globe