Inevitably, in secularized society, after some particularly heinous butchery there is the news article that might be titled: “Searching for Answers.” In this article the reporter speculates on what might have gone wrong in those two-thirds of the murderer — body and mind — that he must pretend are all that constitutes a man.
Inevitably the answers are dissatisfying, because even the most dedicated materialist-atheist understands in his gut that it’s not social injustice or lover’s frustration or chemical imbalances that drive a man to carve up children, but a desperate soul-sickness. To a world that denies the God-sparked soul, however, man must remain inscrutable, and so therefore must the world be to man, and God to man, and man to himself. This is the great alienation, not man from his labor, or man from Nature, or man from his mother.
But newspapers can’t speak this way, nor can professors or philosophers, and increasingly neither can preachers, which presents to us a future in which we all know something is desperately wrong, but where we no longer have words to name it.
