There Was Room Under the Tent
This week, I found myself thinking about a tragic story that recently concluded in a Texas courtroom. For those unfamiliar with the case, a brief summary can be found here . Last April, at a high school track meet, a severe storm forced hundreds of students to seek shelter from the rain. A seventeen-year-old student found his way to a tent that belonged to another school. What began as a dispute over space escalated into an argument. The argument became a confrontation. The confrontation became violent. One teenager shoved a student. The other responded by pulling out a knife and stabbing him in the chest. A young man lost his life. Another young man was recently sentenced to decades in prison. As is often the case in America, the story quickly became entangled in debates about race, politics, self-defense, and social justice. Commentators rushed to fit the tragedy into familiar ideological categories. Yet before any of those larger questions, I found myself troubled by something m...