Praying amid a manhunt

Reading some tweets as police hunt for the still-living Boston Marathon bombing suspect: “Arsenal Street looks like a scene from a movie. … Arsenal Street doesn’t look real right now.” Then come the drama critics: “Arsenal Street looks like a scene from a bad action movie.” And, of course, the personal touch: “I was actually planing [sic] to go to the mall on Arsenal Street today.”

But pastor John Piper had a different perspective: “My prayer for the running Boston bomber: Make his foot slip. Spare more victims. Save his soul.”

More tweets: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is cornered. Cops … flushing him out. … Tsarnaev probably will be taken dead, but kinda hope he’s taken alive.” Yes, kinda, both to learn who were the suspects’ accomplices and trainers, and what leads a human being to place a bomb next to an 8-year-old.

The Wall Street Journal reported on an apparent profile of suspect-at-large Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the Russian social-networking site Vkontakte: It lists Islam-related pages such as “Salamworld: My Religion—Islam” and includes a propagandistic video asking jihadists to go to Syria to fight alongside rebels there.

The differing reactions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dad and uncle raise more questions about how to react to evil. Father Anzor Tsarnaev, speaking by telephone from Russia, told The Associated Press, “My son is a true angel. Dzhokhar is … such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.” But Uncle Ruslan Tsarni called the suspected bombers “losers” who had created “shame” for all Chechens and “do not deserve to live on this earth.”

It’s human nature for the dad to defend and apparently be deluded by his child. The last verse of the Old Testament is, “He will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” The hearts of fathers are almost always turned to their children, but what if the children make destruction their goal? What then?