We prefer to think that evil is something “bad people” do, and that these bad people are easily recognizable. We see a mug shot on the news and say “Oh, he looks like a child molester, like a mass shooter, like a serial killer, like a bad person. Or as often as not today we think of evil as that perpetrated only by our political opposites. We describe such people as “inhuman” or “deplorable”, descriptors that gives us the relief of distance. The guise evil wears is, of course, always that of someone else.
Henry Benjamin Whipple – first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, evangelist and defender of the Minnesota Indians, and the man who bent the ear of America’s greatest president to stop a mass execution.
