Boston Marathon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We don’t know, and we can’t imagine.

via “We Don’t Know.” (a post on Quest for Meaning, a Unitarian Universalist blog.)

Today as I go about my life, I hear the words of Martin Sheen in my head, narrating a documentary I sometimes show in my classes, “On this day, there is only one place to be.” The words are a part of “Bringing Down a Dictator,” a film about the nonviolent overthrow of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 2000.

For me, on this day, there was only one thing to do. Our scheduled topic for my Introductory Sociology class was religion. I did work in the topic, but clearly not in the way I had planned. We talked about the Boston marathon bombings, and differently in each class, deferring to the experiences of people in the room. Some of…