Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 28:1 (Winter 2014)
Article: Editor’s Reflections
Author: William David Spencer

PP 28:1 (Winter 2014) p. 2

Editor’s Reflections

William David Spencer

This issue is about ideas having consequences, finally centering, as we always do, on our target area: making sense of gender relations.

As all issues of Priscilla Papers, this present one has been pieced together over months (and sometimes years), and each editorial is written on a topic relevant to the issue. But, at the same time, each editorial is also written within a life context.

In the present instance, the life context and the topic are certainly related, as I, and everyone else I know here in Massachusetts, continue trying to make sense of the macrocosmic events of the Boston Marathon bombing. The rest of the country and the rest of the world have long since moved on to other incidences and concerns, but not Boston. The commemorating phrase “Boston Strong” has become endemic, a regular fixture in the speeches of Massachusetts politicians and news commentators, painted on commuter trains, present in seemingly every home in magnets on refrigerators, given away or sold as fundraisers for the victims by local hardware stores, and on and on. This event was to Boston as the slaughtering of children was to Newtown, or the Twin Towers devastation to New York, or the subway poison gas attacks to Tokyo. A population does not simply move on from something like this—it becomes an inseparable part of its identity. Those living in Boston and its environs continue to revisit this confounding tragedy. For the victims, it was, of course, a life-changing catastrophe, but, for the perpetrators, it was a tragedy in the classic sense, the result of a character flaw that propelled two young men from a Muslim extremist-dominated section of Russia to kill four people, force the amputation of the limbs of seventeen others, maiming them for life, and wounding some 280 more, some of these critically— not one of whom they knew. What this devastation meant is that they took the life of a beloved eight-year-old boy, inflicted on his mother a brain injury, and destroyed his sister’s leg, though all of these members of a single family were complete strangers to them. Their thinking also compelled these men to murder a young male police officer only one year on the job, as well as two young women, one a 29-year-old restaurant worker renowned for her sunny disposition, the other, not even an American, but a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student who, we have been told, had been attending InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and was contemplating giving her life to Jesus.

Why would anybody do such a thing to strangers they might like or come to love, had they had the opportunity to meet them? After all, nobody wakes up one holiday morning and says, “My, what a beautiful day. What should I do today? Maybe something totally...