From Father George W. Rutler in his parish bulletin this Sunday (he’s the pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in Manhattan–and, also, of course, an occasional contributor to NR and NRO–and even pops in on The Corner now and again): “For several generations it has been the fashion to deny the reality of good and evil, and to reduce human behavior to a pragmatic naturalist calculus of psychological adjustment and maladjustment. Once you shun God and stop believing in the existence of supernatural evil, it becomes hard to explain holiness and villainy. Mixed with political motives, this helps to explain why so many journalists shrink from identifying terrorists as terrorists. With remarkable consistency, our major news services have called those who massacred the Russian children in Beslan virtually everything except evil. Only slightly less remarkable than the term “activists” (Pakistan Times are these euphemisms: “hostage-takers” (Los Angeles Times), “fighters” (Washington Post), “commandos” (Agence France-Presse), “radicals” (BBC), “separatists” (Christian Science Monitor) and “insurgents” (New York Times).”