Our friend David Goldman on the murders in Norway: A Time to Be Silent and Mourn . There is, he writes,
a streak of human depravity that defies any effort to fit it into the pattern of events. It is suicide writ large, a propensity for self-destruction that wants to take with it as much of the world as available technology makes feasible. If divine grace is inexplicable, so is the radical rejection of grace. “Everything that arises is only worth its own destruction,” Mephistopheles told Faust, as he explained his grudge against all that exists.
He goes on to suggest what this reality requires of us.
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