SENTINEL WATCH:: May 21, 2007 Issue

THE RIGHT SORT OF SERMON

CARYL FARKAS

A RECENT OP-ED PIECE in The New York Times ("The Morality Line," by David Brooks, April 19, 2007) cited the way many in the media and society are endeavoring to process the recent tragic events at Virginia Tech. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and others often routinely describe human behavior as the result of fixed patterns in the human brain. But Brooks suggests there must be a way out of the hopelessness that comes from accepting that people are simply preprogrammed by their genes and brain makeup.

"We're not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle," he writes, adding, "It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui [the gunman at Virginia Tech] could have been saved from his demons with better sermons." But he ends, "It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center."

While Brooks takes a step in the right direction by challenging his readers not to rule out the moral question, ruling out "better sermons" isn't an option I would jump to. I agree with what Mary Baker Eddy saw about religion—that it has to be embraced as more than tradition and perfunctory words. "The best sermon ever preached," she wrote, "is Truth practised and demonstrated by the destruction of sin, sickness, and death" (Science and Health, p. 201).