Of course, that doesn't mean we could never tell some kind of explanatory story about the combination of circumstances, including tendencies within the culture as a whole, which would go some way to understand the chain of events that led up to a particular incident (we in the UK are quite preoccupied just now with the inquest on some of the soldiers who died early in the Iraq conflict, and with the refusal of the U.S. to release relevant evidence), and to do so with a view to attempting to eliminate the causes, not least the causes within the cultural milieu, that can lead and have led to particular horrible incidents.

Having said all that, what my faith tradition insists upon, in a way that marks it out at this point from most if not all other faith traditions, is that the fact of the incarnation and the cross means that the creator God is with us in the middle of the horror, sharing and bearing the pain and the burden. This, clearly, is why so many medieval churches -- at a time of endless wars, incurable diseases, social ills, and so on -- had (to us) quite graphic and gory pictures and statues of the crucifixion.

The church has always found, not always explicitly in words but often through symbol and action, and supremely the Eucharist, that the God we know in Jesus Christ is not, as it were, the lofty C.E.O. of the Universe, 'running' the world as it were at a distance, but the God who is strangely present in the midst of the horror, taking its main weight on himself and working from within to bring healing and hope.

That is what, just before I got the message to which I am responding, I was praying in the case of the whole community at Virginia Tech. My wife and I were recently in Roanoke, just down the valley, and our thoughts and prayers are with the good people of that lovely region as the clash between the church's Easter message and the reality of a rebellious world is acted out so plainly and horribly.