An e-mail from a reader in response to this Corner post of mine:

Tucker Carlson had the wisdom to say on MSNBC that there is nothing at the core of the massacre; the acts are senseless and meaningless.It reminds me of Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot (which actually came true to some degree in the making of the film Hurricane). The main character was searching for an answer to the evil with which he and the world are afflicted. When the author has the main character come upon the fact of a man having sex with a teenager, the author informs us through the mind of the main character that there is nothing there. In the book, the Lancelot quest for the answer to moral evil echoes the answer of St. Augustine: Evil is nothingness, evil is a mystery, evil is incomprehensible. One can note the word “diabolical” also: it means “tear apart.” Evil fragments meaning and community. God and the good are “symbolic,” in the sense that they bind communities together with meaning.