Read a July 20, 2012, post at the Daily Theology blog titled “Confronting our culture of violence.” It is by Kevin Ahern, a doctoral candidate in theological ethics at Boston College. Ahern wonders if “the time is ripe for the US Bishops to clarify and teach how we might address this challenge pastorally and politically?”

Read a July 20, 2012, RNS article about religious leaders urging tighter gun control, as well as prayer, in the wake of the Colorado shooting.

“Can we talk about guns?” is a July 21, 2012, blog post at The Christian Century by Richard A. Kauffman. “Could we have a civil conversation about our differences on guns and the deleterious effect of guns in our society?” he writes. “Any chance that churches could start that conversation?”

Read blogger Ellen Painter Dollar’s July 22, 2012, column on Patheos.com, in which she says that gun control is such a hot-button issue that some people of faith are unwilling to take it on.

Read a July 22, 2012, essay on Christianity Today’s site, “Making Non-Sense of the Colorado Shootings.”

A July 23, 2012, Religion News Service article explores the question “Is gun control a religious issue?” It’s pegged to a column by the Rev. James Martin, posted by the Jesuit weekly America.

Julia A. Upton is professor and provost at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y. She is author of A Time for Embracing:  Reclaiming Reconciliation.

Sara Shady is an assistant professor of philosophy at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. She has worked on research involving environmental ethics.

Steven J. Sandage is associate professor of marriage and family studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. A psychologist, he is co-author of The Faces of Forgiveness: Searching for Wholeness and Salvation and To Forgive Is Human: How to Put Your Past in the Past.