God's Eternal Imperative

In Dan Brown's Inferno — which appears as a film in theaters October 28 — an unhinged scientist is obsessed with increasing scarcity — quite unlike the psalmist of today’s reading, who rejoices in God’s abundance. 

First came Dante Alighieri's classic poem Divine Comedy, which takes readers on a trip to hell in the section called "Inferno."

Then Dan Brown wrote the best-selling novel Inferno, which features his globe-trotting hero Robert Langdon on a quest to stop worldwide genocide.

Now, this Friday, October 28, the movie Inferno will be released, with Tom Hanks once again playing Robert Langdon. He'll follow clues in Dante's Divine Comedy as he attempts to stop a criminal mastermind from unleashing a biological weapon. Langdon will hop from Florence to Venice to Istanbul on his quest to solve riddles and save the world.

The villain in the story is a scientist who threatens to halt the growth of the human population by use of a bio-weapon. He believes that global population will soon overtake Earth's scarce resources, so he creates a disease to infect a large portion of the world's population.

In short, he wants to save humanity by eliminating millions of people.

For Langdon, the imperative is to...