• Love 1, Constitution 0.
• Dylann Roof killed nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, ages 26 to 87 (one was the pastor and a state senator). He opened fire on his targets after spending an hour with them in their Bible-study class. Lesson not learned. But survivors and relatives of the victims, undeterred, tried again at Roof’s bond hearing. “We are the family that love built,” Bethane Middleton-Brown, sister of one of the dead, told him. “We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive. I pray God on your soul.” It is some comfort to know that Roof’s violent racism — he hoped, he said, to start a race war — is now the pathology of deviants, not, as it was even 60 years ago, the creed of large swatches of America. Beyond politics and countries is the struggle to know and share God’s love in a fallen world. Bless Emanuel AME and so many others in Charleston for their example. Beside it the 24/7 yakfest of so much modern life shrivels to insect chatter.
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