Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...killers gave evil a face, the victims lent theirs to grace. In ever widening circles the story that lingers is the tale of Cassie Bernall, the girl who when asked "Do you believe in God?" was murdered when she said yes. We expect our martyrs to be etched in stained glass, not carrying a backpack and worrying about their weight and their finals. Hers is a mystery story, the tale of a girl lost to bad friends and drugs and witchcraft and all the dark places of teenage rebellion. Even a youth minister who had some experience turning poisoned kids...
...Columbine tragedy didn't start out as a front-page story about the battle between good and evil. But it has been moving there, as the trauma overflowed the argument about guns and culture and spilled into other realms. With each passing day of shock and grief you could almost hear the church bells tolling in the background, calling the country to a different debate, a careful conversation in which even Presidents and anchormen behave as though they are in the presence of something bigger than they are, and maybe should lower their voices a little and speak with less...
...avoid nor answer. The talk-show rituals of absolution--blame the culture, the parents, the guns, the video games--left too much unresolved for those inclined to declare that the boys were simply, deeply wicked. But for those with an eye toward larger battles, the killers were not themselves evil; they were instruments of it, of the dark force we met in Narnia and try not to think about once we grow up, until the day we have no choice. Hence the 15 crosses planted up on the hill, and the argument about whether the killers deserved to have their...
Conservatives have argued that liberals are unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of evil, which is another way of saying that they resist even engaging in the religious conversation that Littleton invites. But if we imagine how the talk-show version would go--a Crossfire shouting match on the nature of Satan--we may be grateful that the conversation is flourishing in private, at the dinner table, walking to work. If we wander a while now through more haunting places, if we read the news of the latest massacre in Kosovo and see more than geopolitics at work, if we suspect...
Perhaps it has something to do with what director George Lucas calls the "classical mythological motifs" which are at the very heart of the original trilogy. All of the elements of a fable are present--heroes, villains, fights to the death, miraculous rescues, betrayal, good vs. evil, mystery, political intrigue, romance, faith, and even a bit of the supernatural. But instead of reading about it in the Brothers Grimm, we get to watch it on the big screen with surround-sound. And instead of knights and princesses, evil stepmothers and swordfights, we get space travel and lightsabers, droids...