After the Santa Fe High School shooting this week, I wanted to grieve silently and wonder alone at what could be so wrong with our society that we shrug and move on again and again, as if child sacrifice were a regular ritual that we accept as shameful but  unchangeable. But then it occurred again, this time at a graduation near my home.  Even if we have no easy answer to this evil among us, silence, even in grief, is tacit complicity.  So I offer these thoughts. Human sacrifice has been both scorned and accepted throughout what we know of our history.  Archeologists have recently uncovered the site of 140 child sacrifices in Peru, said to date from 550 years ago.  Still child sacrifice has not been simply the heathen practice depicted of savages appeasing volcanic gods.  The biblical stories of Abraham and Jephtah also reference the practice. As civilized people, we claim to have risen above such pagan acts, and yet here we are.  Wikipedia has a page chronicling mass school shootings in this country.  Since Columbine in 1999, when 15 died, the incidents have grown in number and victims in what should be alarming regularity. And yet, here … Continue reading The Sacrifice of Children