I’d kill you without blinking
“Dear Dzhokhar, you failed. Did you ever think that you would make it out? The US captured bin Laden and Saddam. There was no chance you would escape. This is not the measure of your success, though. Dear Dzhokhar, you failed because Boston was neither bowed nor afraid. You set off a bomb, and the city gave blood for victims. You escaped initial capture and the city opened its doors to strangers. You were at large and making more bombs, and we gathered in prayer at Garvey Park and the cathedral. You went on a rampage, and people stayed home in an orderly fashion and opened their homes to the police during the search. Dear Dzhokhar, you failed, because light cast out the darkness, and the man who knew that his boat just didn’t look right wasn’t afraid to call it in.”
~ Rev. Mr. Michael Rogers, S.J.
Read full text, this link.
When two or more gather
“This is what it feels liketo re-shape grief into love.
Not because it’s simple or easy
but for four lights lost
and the hope of not losing again.”
~ Meg Fowler
Read full text of poem, this link.
Moral value: Love
“You are probably not a psychopath or currently suffering from some other variety of mental illness or developmental disorder that limits your capacity for empathy. You have the ability to, put simply, put yourself in the shoes of another living human. That’s good: humans evolved to have this capacity for empathy for a reason. Which sounds kind of like a tautology but really isn’t: we developed the ability to feel for others to understand the actions of others, such that we ourselves can better survive and thrive on Earth and, you know, have babies and stuff.It’s not much more poetic than that. So, having empathy, you might be confronted with an uncomfortable feeling about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old Russian-born suburbanite currently struggling to not die in a very, very well-guarded hospital room in Boston. That feeling is feeling sorry for him, and it is most definitely not the feeling that you are supposed to have and you might have even kept it to yourself. See, feeling empathy for a suspected terrorist also feels like it should carry with it an absence of empathy for the many innocent people maimed or killed in the twin Boston Marathon explosions and the aftermath, though there’s no good reason those two feelings should be mutually exclusive or contradictory.”
~ Michael Byrne
Read full text, with powerful imagery, this link.











