A bit over a year ago now, we experienced a national disaster of previously unimaginable proportions. Reverberations from that day haunt us still, as images of the scenes of horror, unfathomable grief, unbearable sadness, loss, and pain reappear so readily unless they are purposefully suppressed. Even from this distance, time has not healed the wounds inflicted on that day. Thousands of innocent lives were so abruptly torn from us that morning—fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandparents, best friends, and innumerable incarnations of “the love-of-my-life.”

When the devastation wrought by unbridled expressions of human hatred is so extensive, it blinds us for a time from even acknowledging the potential for good that humanity possesses. Somehow the noise and chaos from the worst expressions of human behavior overshadow all else in our consciousness. But even before all the events in this tragedy had unfolded, even...

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