In the 19th century, a tribe in Fiji ate a missionary-cooked him in a brick oven. A few or so ago, the boyfriend of the mother of a 14 year old named Ebony, a young artist who wanted to attend Villanova, where her dad worked, allegedly strangled her by tying her pajama bottoms around her neck. A mother and her daughter's friends gang up on a 13 year old who has a history of low self esteem in a series of emails and drive her to suicide .

As the cat sleeps on my bed and my 12 year old makes a gingerbread tree in the kitchen sink (so as not to get the icing all over, of course) these events seem very far away. But they are not-the lion that lurks at the door, the drumbeat of plotting in the adjoining village, violence is only as far away as our next door neighbor's argument or the latest Coen brother's gorefeast at the multiplex.

To say we are flawed is a gross understatement. We are savages, sinners so broken we can't fix ourselves. When the evolutionary biologists and psychologists argue we are evolving in a beneficial way, we have to ask-into what?

Without divine intervention, we are lost-cannibals all.

Sola gratia. Sola gratia. Sola gratia.