View of Jesus

Your Of Many Things column on March 17 referred to Jesus Before Christianity, by Albert Nolan, O.P. For six years in the late 1970’s, my family and I lived in Cape Town, South Africa, during which I did a three-year certificate program at the Kolbe School of Theology.

One of our three main teachers was Father Nolan. We had the privilege of reading Jesus Before Christianity the year before it was published. It was and is still a refreshing, provocative view of Jesus, which dramatically deepened my earlier beliefs and made them much more real. That change has persisted. My memory is that he had a similar impact on the other participants.

What a wonderful difference a single individual can make!

Terry J. van der Werff

Right to Life

Your editorial on gun control (2/10) misses the value of firearms in preserving human life. Just as we support the right to life of the unborn and the elderly, the lives of bus and cab drivers, gas station attendants and convenience store clerks are equally precious. Such people often must work at night in dangerous urban or even rural areas, becoming easy targets for predators, whom the courts and law enforcement cannot control.

Each year between one and two million armed Americans defend themselves and their families from injury, sexual assault and death, often without even firing their guns. Would you prefer to condemn them to submit to the savagery of criminals by disarming them?

The solution to violent crime involving firearms and other deadly weapons is to get the criminals who carry or use them in crimes off our streets by long prison sentences. Imposing liability standards on cities, police, judges, parole boards and probation officers would inhibit the Turn Them Loose Bruce types from releasing dangerous felons into the population. The prospect of million-dollar lawsuits by victims and their families would make our society far safer than any gun control scheme that merely keeps decent people helpless in the face of violent criminals.

William J. Brennan