To be sure, the way of discipleship is arduous and Christians will not always agree. Yet Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is hardly a call to prayer. 5:9).Īmbrose Bierce, that curmudgeonly agnostic, once defined a Christian as someone who chooses to follow the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Nor in the name of American exceptionalism are we exempt from their counsels of peace-making. The Second Amendment is not a codicil to Matthew’s Beatitudes. But nowhere in the Christian Scriptures do we find a sacred right to bear arms. Constitutional experts differ and no doubt will continue to do so. And those who profess to be Christian do have a Bible! Whether the Second Amendment of our Constitution guarantees a citizen’s right to bear any gun, however destructive, is legally moot. Second, we pray in the words of our Scriptures. Believers cannot afford the luxury of despair. We cannot, of course, legislate against every evil but the very purpose of criminal law is to mitigate it. We may, of course, differ in details, but surely the preponderance of evidence-and experience of nations like our own-bears ample testimony to the wisdom of legislation limiting who can possess guns and the kind of guns possessed. Have I truly searched my heart (and not merely the bible of the NRA) to explore every means, including fitting legislation that would forestall such tragedies? To pray for victims of violence is to pledge myself to do all in my power to prevent victimization. It is rather a fact of our sinful nature, and that is precisely why we pray, “Deliver us from evil.” And to pray implicates us in that deliverance. The violence that has become as banal as our litanies is not an inevitable natural occurrence. What does it mean, then, to pray for victims? In the first place, to pray for victims is to acknowledge that they are victims, innocents who suffer the violence of a sinful world. But what do we mean by it? Thoughts are cheap but prayer, as the martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, is costly.

“Thoughts and prayers”-the refrain to all our litanies of mass killings and terror is so familiar as to become banal. is Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology and a faculty scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Nra speech thoughts and prayers