Adopted as an infant by Rev. Charles T. Carson and his wife, May, Norman Carson grew up in Sterling, Kan. The family moved to Beaver Falls, Pa., in 1941, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944. He served in the Medical Corps and the OSS in the China-Burma-lndia Theater under the command of Lord Mountbatten and was discharged in 1945.

Carson graduated from Geneva College in 1947, received his Master’s degree in English from the University of Iowa, and entered the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1949, graduating in 1952. He pastored the Chicago RP congregation from 1952–1955, and at that time entered the Boston University graduate program, receiving his Ph.D. in 1961.

Meanwhile, he had begun teaching English literature at Geneva in 1957 and retired from that position in 1991. Carson took a leave of absence in 1968–1969 and pastored the Dublin Road congregation in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Upon his return to Geneva, he assumed the chair of the Department of English that he held until 1981. In 1991–1992, he taught English at Christ’s College, Taipei, Taiwan.

Carson has written numerous articles and reviews for the Witness and other scholarly magazines and has recently published Received in Grace, the story of his search for his birth family.

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My experience of September 11 would probably compare best with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were traumatic in my experience but not to the same degree that Pearl Harbor or September 11 were. The Oklahoma City bombing, the Waco disaster, the earlier WTC bombing, and the bombings on foreign soil of American facilities might be compared also. They, too, impacted my thinking but to a lesser degree than September 11 and Pearl Harbor.

I experienced the outpouring of national anger and subsequent national patriotism to the degree that they occurred only in the two incidents—September 11 and Pearl Harbor. Somehow, the other events that I have cited never exercised the American public to anything like the kind of patriotism that these two events did, even though the public generally was tremendously shocked by these other events.

September 11 was unique, I think, because of its enormity—that is, the degree of evil that it represented—because of the tremendous loss of life and property, and because it resulted exclusively in the loss of innocent, civilian life.

World War II changed my life personally by thrusting me directly into a global war in which I was for two years no longer a common civilian but totally under the command of my military superiors. This of course entailed a discipline that I had never had to be subject to in my life. I was also thrust into the kind of immoral climate that was completely foreign to my personal experience, resulting in a serious examination on my part of my Christian beliefs and practices. Finally, the experience, in a kind of positive way, allowed me to see a great part of the world that I might never have seen otherwise and to learn much from contact with many other persons from vastly different backgrounds than mine.

I think that I see in the September 11 events two things: first, it demonstrates simply another example of the depravity of human kind, but on a scale very seldom seen. Second, it strikes me as a kind of horrific, evil act carried out upon innocent persons unlike the military action of World War II. My participation in World War II was at that time in my life probably the most impressive introduction to human evil, particularly as I came to understand in later years all the ramifications of that war, not just on my life but globally as well.

Having said that, I probably would add that the events of September 11, while different in character from the Pearl Harbor attack, only confirm my long-held belief in the depravity of human kind when not restrained even by the common grace of God.