Smart People Get Me Thinking

I sent my "Mentally Ill, Psychopath, or Evil? I Need to Know" post to a hundred or so of my closest friends. I invited my former theology professors and past and present colleagues in Catholic publishing to weigh in on the issue since they are really smart.

Here's what some of them said, which made me think about the tragedy from different vantage points. I love it when dialogue like this expands your brain.

Tom McGrath, Vice President of New Product Development at Loyola Press, whom I worked with at "U.S. Catholic" magazine:

"It's hard to judge from the outside what kinds and clusters of impairments are at work. But I know this: we are often more capable of moral action than we let on. We can train ourselves to lean toward moral choices and surround ourselves with supports--or we can do the opposite. And here's one thing I suspect: human intervention in the form of loving concern can increase the odds of a person's choosing morally, even when in the depths of despair and beleaguered by impairments and impediments. And what happens when people who have mental illness get marginalized is that the opportunities for such intervention of loving concern diminish and isolation breeds darkness."

Keith Egan, my former theology professor and thesis advisor:

"Amidst all this anguish and anxiety that the Virginia Tech event has brought us, we are children of HOPE, the assurance that God loves us intensely and calls us to a life of love and wants us to live in union with God's self. Evil acts must not obscure our awareness of how much goodness there is in our fragile world where there are multitudes of generous, loving even heroic people who show evil to be isolated acts, acts wrought in isolation. It is a paradox that acts like those at Virginia Tech bring out so much goodness and affirm the need for us to resist evil and to do so with our brothers and sisters. I think community--Christian koinonia--is a response to evil."

And Joe Incandela, from whom I took the class "The Problem of Evil," turbocharged my brain cells (as he always does) with this comment:

"I wonder if the natural law tradition would come in here: namely, some conviction that (somehow) implanted in us all is a basic sense of right and wrong such that we feel one just ought to know that murdering 30 plus people should fall on one side of that line. It seems that Christianity cannot long survive without some notion of free will (if one starts saying that Eve was just addicted to apples, then I think the whole house of cards falls rather quickly). Also, if evil (or at least what we call evil) is the result of misfiring neurons, then why can't we say that good is the result of a more fortunate combination of biological heritage and luck?"

Other opinions are found on the Beliefnet main page story format of the post and on my other blog post, "The Evil/Mental-Illness Debate."

Feel free to comment more here.