page_title: Greg Barrett
section_title: Books
hierarchical_section_title: Greg Barrett / Books
caption_attribution_description: English: Book jacket for nonfiction book, THE GOSPEL OF RUTBA: War, Peace and the Good Samaritan Story in Iraq
context_page_description: Greg Barrett is an American author, freelance writer, public speaker, and former newspaper and wire journalist. He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.
context_section_description: His first non-fiction book, The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok (Wiley 2008), is the story of Redemptorist Catholic priest Rev. Joseph H. Maier, a native of Washington in the United States who lives and works in the port-side slums of Bangkok, Thailand. For more than three decades, "Father Joe" and his nonprofit Human Development Foundation and Mercy Centre helped relieve Bangkok's grinding poverty by constructing and managing more than thirty slum preschools, four orphanages and two AIDS hospices, often without church sanction or legal permits. The Nautilus Book Awards honored The Gospel of Father Joe with a silver medal in 2009 in the category of Conscious Media-Journalism-Investigative Reporting.
  In June 2012 Barrett's narrative nonfiction book The Gospel of Rutba: War, Peace and the Good Samaritan Story in Iraq was released by Orbis Books, a leading U.S. publisher of religious books and the publishing arm of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. The book was edited by Orbis publisher Robert Ellsberg, son of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In The Gospel of Rutba Barrett tells the story of three U.S. Christian peacemakers who were injured in a bad car accident in Iraq during the U.S.-led bombing of that country in March 2003. He chronicles how the western desert town of Ar Rutba, a Sunni-majority town under heavy attack from the United States, turned the other cheek and cared for the injured Americans: author-activist Shane Claiborne of Philadelphia's The Simple Way; Christian Peacemaker Teams veteran Cliff Kindy; and Mennonite pastor-activist Rev. Weldon Nisly. Three days earlier, on March 26, 2003, Rutba's only hospital had been bombed by U.S. Army Special Forces. After rescuing, treating and protecting the peacemakers, Rutba locals refused the Americans' effort to pay them. Dr. Farouq Al-Dulaimi, the director of the hospital bombed three days earlier, asked for the Americans to do only one thing: "Go and tell the world about Rutba." Seven years later, Barrett, who had reported from the streets of prewar Iraq in January and February 2003 alongside three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, returned to Iraq with the unarmed peacemakers in an effort to tell the story of Rutba. Archbishop emeritus Rev. Desmond Tutu contributed the book's foreword and The Simple Way's Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, wrote its afterword.
caption: Book jacket for THE GOSPEL OF RUTBA
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