By Richard Panzer, President, Unification Theological Seminary
Earlier this month, like many of you, I was riveted to the news channels watching coverage of the Boston Bombing and relieved when the two brothers who perpetrated these acts were stopped.
I have been trying to understand how two brothers who came to America to better their lives could morph into murderers.
The simplest answer I can come up with is: they believed committing an act of terror was a way to serve God.
We could look for the personal and family reasons that would explain why they embraced a radical Islamist worldview that views residents of America as enemies, but the bottom line is that someone offered them a teaching that justified mass killing.
How do you defeat an ideology that leads people to believe that they are serving the Creator by committing such acts? Is this something our government can do? Doubtful.
As initially reported by the Los Angeles Times, the elder Tsarnaev brother was thrown out of a mosque after a shouting match with the imam during a Friday prayer service. The paper quoted several worshippers as saying that Tsarnaev had yelled at the imam for having pointed to Martin Luther King, Jr., as a role model for Muslims. Tsarnaev protested that King could not be a model because he was “not a Muslim.”
Applied Unificationism 
Recent Comments