Assaulted as we are by almost daily images of new brutal killings in the United States and Europe, many of us find it difficult to respond.
Each image of shootings by police or of police in the United States and of people mown down by the truck in Nice evokes personal sympathy for the victims. But each image also reflects the reality of a wider social conflict between black and white or between rogue Islamic ideology and Western society, and demands that we form a judgment on these issues.
It is challenging to respond in a way that holds these twin aspects together, particularly when public discussion is so inflamed and each event is followed quickly by another even more appalling. So, now there is Munich, and there is Kabul, and there is Rouen.
The best way to respond is to keep focused on what matters: the human beings involved. These are principally the people who were killed and those who did the killing. To focus on them, however, draws our eyes further out to include those to whom they were related as family, friends, fellow students, workmates, and through their personal experience or cultural, political and religious interests.
Human beings are not islands. They are joined to others and to the wider world by the bridges and causeways of the relationships that shape them as persons.
These relationships are interlocking, so that what happens to one person affects families, groups, towns and eventually a whole society. For this reason it is inadequate to respond to the deaths of victims only by grieving for them as individuals. They invite us to hold in our minds and hearts their relatives, their workmates and communities, and to ask how we can best support them to deal with the violent death of their spouse, brother or sister or friend.
This will lead us to reflect on the society in which they live and on the resources, prejudices and fears that will affect the possibility of healing. So we will be led to grapple with the larger conflicts that formed the context of their grief.
It is more challenging to enter the humanity of those responsible for killing. Once we see them as human beings we cannot define them exclusively by their action, whatever its motivation.
"Before condemning the police as racist we should reflect on the broader relationships of the individual persons involved, particularly those involved in the culture of a