Tag Archives: startribune

Bible a key to murder case

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A friend called to tell me about the murder of his friend Earl Olander soon after it happened. Hollis knew the victim, 90 year-old Earl Olander, mercilessly beaten in his Carver County farm house.

Why would anyone would do this [i.e., tie him up, beat him with a shotgun, ransack his farm house, leave him half-dead] to a sweet-spirited old man like Earl?

A new use for the Bible appeared as the lead headline on the front page of this morning’s StarTribune:

“Stolen Bible leads police to suspects in death of 90 year-old Carver County man: After 90 year-old man was beaten to death, his stolen Bible led police to two suspects.” – StarTribune

Though a suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, charges have been brought against the two suspects based, in part, on the discovery of the victim’s large European Bible containing two savings bonds a cleaning agent found in a vacated apartment in Saint Paul, MN.

The Bible has many uses. It speaks of grace, of sin, of homicide, of betrayal, brutality, denial, mercy, and more. Now, in the murder of 90 year-old Earl Olander that defies explanation, it serves as the primary piece of evidence in a court of law.

“Before the attackers fled,” says the StarTribune, “they ransacked Olander’s home and stole the Bible, as well as coins, old silverware, and two-dollar bills.

“[A neighbor of Olander] said he found it ‘quite ironic that it was the Bible’ that helped investigators make the arrests. ‘Think about that.'” [Star Tribune story]

“The book to read is not the book that thinks of you, but the one that makes you think.  No book in the world equals the Bible for that. – Harper Lee, author, To Kill a Mockingbird

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 14, 2015.

Like beads on a string

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This morning’s StarTribune carries a number of stories Views from the Edge ties together like beads on a string. The string is our culture’s addiction to violence.

Bead #1: Madison students protest shooting [Section A,  p. 1 & 5, reprint from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and local Madison high school students marched to the State Capitol where “about 1,500 protested the death of Tony Robinson, 19, who was shot and killed by a Madison Police Officer Friday night.” Tony Robinson was black; the officer is white.

“Madison Police Chief Mike Koval issued an apology on his blog,

Reconciliation cannot begin without my stating ‘I am sorry’, and I don’t think I can say this enough. I am sorry. I hope that, with time, Tony’s family and friends can search their hearts to render some measure of forgiveness.

Protesters honored the urging of the Robinson family that protests be peaceful.

Bead #2: U of Oklahoma kicks fraternity off campus for racial chants [p. 3, re-print from the New York Times]

No sooner had that nation observed the 50th Anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama than University President David Boren shut down the local chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Oklahoma. Boren ordered members of the fraternity to remove their things from the frat house by midnight at which time the house would be closed.

The closing came after videos showed a group of young men in formal attire “riding a bus and singing a chant laden with anti-black slurs and at least one reference to lynching.”  A student group calling itself the Unheard Movement had posted the video on YouTube and identified the men as members of the local SAE chapter.

The video contains this message: “This video contains language that is offensive, disrespectful and unacceptable. Even after 50 years after the events that occurred in Selma, Alabama, we will have a reason to march. We as a people have come a long way, but yet still have so far to go.”

Bead #3: Boy shoots girlfriend, kills self  [Twin Cities & Region Section, p. 1]

The 14 year-old girlfriend, who’d been shot in the chest and face, was later alert enough to tell investigators her 15 year-old boyfriend had been “playing” with the gun when it went off accidentally.  After the gun went off, the distraught boyfriend ran outside with the handgun. He was found face down with the gun nearby. According to the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office “there are no additional suspects being sought and no specific concern to public safety with regard to this incident.”

The string: American culture’s addition to violence, racism, and guns, and the increasing number of Americans who are joining “the Unheard Movement” to say “Enough!”

 

 

 

In Memoriam: the MSU Philosophy Student

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“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” – Cicero

The philosophy student who shot himself in the library at Mankato State University yesterday could have been me many years ago. Or is it “could have been ‘I’”? I or me is a question of grammar without much consequence. Philosophy is a question of meaning. Grammarians don’t shoot themselves. Some philosophers do.

I know nothing about the 27-year-old philosophy major at MSU. I don’t need to know more for tears to fall while reading the Star Tribune news report over morning coffee.

A Minnesota State University Mankato student shot and killed himself Monday afternoon in the campus library.

Police were called about 4 p.m. to the library after receiving a report of a suicidal man. After searching Memorial Library, police found the 27-year-old man, a junior philosophy student, on the second floor. Police said he turned the gun on himself and shot.

Police said no one else was in any danger during the incident.

The library was open Monday evening but with access only to the lower level, first and third floors.

I feel sick. It’s sad enough when anyone takes his or her life. It’s sadder still, at least for me, to learn that he was studying philosophy and that he appears to have found a solitary place on the second floor, perhaps among the stacks in the philosophy section of the library, as I imagine it.

He was a junior, as I was when the course in contemporary philosophy plunged me into deep despair. Psychology majors might have called it depression because it looked like that on my face. But there’s a difference between depression and existential despair.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, No Exit and The Flies, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Trial were like nothing I had ever read or heard. They blew my mind to smithereens, leaving me very much alone with the sense of nothingness.

By the time I hit the books in the library that junior year, I ate, drank, and slept philosophy. Of the 18 hours of courses I had decided to carry, only the philosophy course seemed important. Raised in a Christian home, I had always prayed, more or less, giving thanks and asking for blessings on those I loved and the less fortunate. But now prayer seemed a cruel hoax, “bad faith” as Jean-Paul Sartre put it. Why I would return from class and kneel down beside my bed not for “now I lay me down to sleep” but to tell God to go to hell is one of the great ironies, a question grammarians cannot answer.  Had I had a gun that afternoon, my roommate might have found me on the floor in Room 301 of Carnegie Hall.

I know nothing of the circumstances or state of mind of the 27-year-old MSU philosophy student. Perhaps no one will ever know for sure. It may be that his experience bears little or no resemblance to mine all those years ago. It’s not for me to know.

I don’t even know your name, but I sure do feel you! And I feel for those who mourn your loss. “That God does not exist, I cannot deny,” wrote Sartre, “That my whole being cries out for God, I cannot forget” – Jean-Paul Sartre.

Almighty God, Father of mercies and giver of comfort: deal graciously, we pray, with all who mourn; that, casting all their care on You, they may know the consolation of Your love. [The Book of Common Prayer]

Rest in Peace

– Rev. Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, Minnesota (an hour from Mankato), Feb. 3, 2015.

Glocks in the State Capitol Building

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Glock owner at State Capitol hearing. Photo by David Joles, StarTribune.

Glock owner at State Capitol hearing. Photo by David Joles, StarTribune.

Not in my worst nightmares did I think I’d see the day.

This morning’s Star Tribune front page “Debate Triggers Show of Weapons” and the accompanying photographs are chilling. There are two photos. In one a young man with a loaded Glock strapped to his waist stands with arms folded, looking defiantly smug while he waits to testify about before a legislative committee in the Minnesota State Capitol. In the other two men sit at the hearing table with microphones. One reads from a manuscript; the other covers his face with his left hand as though he can’t believe they’re even discussing this.

I identify with the man with the hand covering his face. I don’t understand the man who brought the .40-caliber Glock to the hearing loaded with 15 rounds. Why would he do that?

“You have to be your own hero on your own white horse” is the way he explained it. He feels safer with his Glock.

Put next to that the statement of Pope Francis, as reported by Vatican Radio: “Faith and violence are incompatible.”

The Pope was preaching on the exact text often used by those who believe that violence and division are compatible with Christian faith. The text is Luke 12:51 in which Jesus asks, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” The division, as interpreted by the Pontiff, is between living for yourself or living in the light of God. Here are Francis’ words:

“The word of the Gospel does not authorize the use of force to spread the faith. It is just the opposite: the true strength of the Christian is the power of truth and love, which leads to the renunciation of all violence. Faith and violence are incompatible”.

The halls of a legislature are intended to be sacred spaces where differences are resolved for the sake of the greater good, where my self-interest and your self-interest, as they are perceived by elected representatives, are expressed and resolved peacefully without intimidation. The chambers of representative democracy are the last place where any legislator or innocent visitor to the State Capitol should face the explicit or implicit intimidation of someone with a Glock.

Faith and violence are incompatible… so are democracy and intimidation.