Theological debates are happening in coffee shops around the country. Young adults like me are up at night blogging and e-mailing their opinions on where to place Seung-Hui Cho – the shooter identified in the Virginia Tech massacre – in the evil versus mentally ill spectrum.

On my Beliefnet blog, “Beyond Blue,” I devoted a week to the discussion of this theological, psychological and sociological riddle. I asked my former theology professors and colleagues in the publishing world to weigh in on this conundrum.

Tom McGrath, vice president of new product development at Loyola Press, whom I worked with at “U.S. Catholic” magazine, said: “It’s hard to judge from the outside what kinds and clusters of impairments are at work. But I know this: We are often more capable of moral action than we let on. We can train ourselves to lean toward moral choices and surround ourselves with supports, or we can do the opposite. ...

“I suspect ... human intervention in the form of loving concern can increase the odds of a person’s choosing morally, even when in the depths of despair and beleaguered by impairments and impediments. ... When people who have mental illness get marginalized ... opportunities for such intervention of loving concern diminish and isolation breeds darkness.”

Keith Egan, my former theology professor and thesis advisor, wrote: “Amidst all this anguish and anxiety that the Virginia Tech event has brought us, we are children of ‘hope,’ the assurance that God loves us intensely and calls us to a life of love. ... It is a paradox that acts like those at Virginia Tech bring out so much goodness and affirm the need for us to resist evil and to do so with our brothers and sisters. I think community – Christian ‘koinonia’ – is a response to evil.”

And Joe Incandela, whose class I took on “The Problem of Evil,” turbocharged my brain cells (as he always does) with this comment: “I wonder if the natural law tradition would come in here: namely, some conviction that (somehow) implanted in us all is a basic sense of right and wrong such that we feel one just ought to know that murdering 30-plus people should fall on one side of that line.

“It seems that Christianity cannot long survive without some notion of free will (if one starts saying that Eve was just addicted to apples, then I think the whole house of cards falls rather quickly).

“Also, if evil (or at least what we call evil) is the result of misfiring neurons, then why can’t we say that good is the result of a more fortunate combination of biological heritage and luck?”

That’s just the start of the conversation.

I know from my own history with bipolar disorder how murky the terrain can be between illness and evil, and that’s why I am so bothered by this news story and other criminal cases that involve mental illness.

During a suicidal depression I couldn’t think clearly – I couldn’t process and interpret situations accurately. However, I heard God’s whisper in the midst of it. I squeezed my medal of St. Therese and clung onto the very thin thread of my faith until I emerged from the darkness, something Cho seems not to have been able to do.

I believe that as the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry advance, we will learn more about the brain – why some people “snap,” seem predisposed to kill or are deaf to their conscience. But until then our only option is to pray for all souls – the mentally ill and the evil doers among us.

Therese J. Borchard writes a syndicated column for Catholic News Service.