By Eva Ciabattoni

Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges examines the importance of the Ten Commandments as a code of moral order and attempts to shed light on what is corroding our collective soul and leaving behind a creeping sense of hollowness and futility in his “Losing Moses on the Freeway” (Free Press, 2005).

After finishing Harvard Divinity School, Hedges did not take the ordination exams but chose instead to become a foreign correspondent, covering wars for 15 years - from El Salvador to Bosnia to Iraq - many of them for the New York Times. He is the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”

Hedges has no illusions about the capacity for wrongdoing that lurks in every human. “The commandments do not protect us from evil,” he writes. “They protect us from committing evil.”

While only two of the commandments are part of the legal code, the 10 together address the most severe violations and moral dilemmas in human life. The book focuses on why they are still important to society and on the present-day consequences of breaking them.

Hedges is no dreamy-eyed pacifist. The point he makes is that killing - any killing, no matter how it is justified - is a violation of the Sixth Commandment and carries a heavy cost. “You shall not kill” has no qualifiers. Hedges illustrates each commandment through modern anecdotes.

To discuss the Sixth Commandment he uses Bishop George Packard, who, as a young man uncertain of his aim in life, fought in Vietnam.

As a soldier, he killed the enemy without any particular emotion or remorse. He has spent the rest of his life in atonement for those killings. He is still haunted by nightmares, by thoughts of children he left fatherless, of wives he widowed.

“Moses” is Hedges’ way of keeping the Fifth Commandment - “Honor your father and your mother” - which, he makes clear, was written for adults, not children.

“We have to see in parents, even bad parents, reflections of ourselves, if only to guard against and keep at bay the demons within us.”

To honor his father, a Presbyterian minister who endured community censure to make principled stands on civil rights and, later, gay rights, Hedges has chosen to speak what he sees as truth to power.

Born of Hedges’ agony, sweat and tears, “Moses” is a cry for Americans to recognize the idolatry that dominates modern life and to renounce its purveyors.