Search Results (98)

The following essay argues that Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, elucidates a corrective to pragmatist deliberative philosophy. First, it begins with the book’s protagonist Rodrigues in his eventual role evaluating banned Christian objects to prevent them from entering seventeenth century Japan. While these actions present a model of a dejected, apostate padre, they also model his silent acknowledgement of suffering. Second, Endō’s narrative does not aim to explain the suffering its characters experience. Instead, it draws its readers into a practical concern for what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as their form of life. Film adaptations highlight the challenges of interpreting religious examples by including artworks that defy easy apprehension. Third, throughout Silence the story navigates the gap between Rodrigues’s visceral suffering and divine silence. In so doing, it exemplifies Simone Weil’s notion of embodied affliction. To fully appreciate such experiences, Weil suggests that the scope of affliction must include divine silence. The desire for God arises in response. A similar contrast can be seen between the characters’ different dispositions towards keeping quiet. In sum, the essay contends that when immanent suffering is inevitable, practices of embodied silence can be the only way to speak. Full article

It is commonly accepted by mental health professionals who work in the area of death and grief that both the help which communities may offer to the bereaved and creativity may prove decisive factors in their recovery after loss; the article aims to introduce specific existential films to the discussion about the value of both. Communality and creativity are also key ecclesiological and theological concepts. They are integral parts of the life of ecclesiastical communities, which honor the memory of the dead and have a duty to stand by their mourning members. These concepts may therefore create a bridge between spirituality and psychology/psychiatry, encouraging church leaders and health professionals to cooperate in addressing the needs of the bereaved. In the above-described context, films like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Rachid Buchareb’s London River (2009) and the short animation film Lila (2014) by Carlos Lascano may become valuable resources. Firstly, for challenging questionable religious responses to death while also discovering beauty in natural and community life in spite of/through loss, as well as embracing the memory of the deceased through creativity. As the latter has been characterized by relevant bibliography in death studies as both a form of expressing grief and a therapeutic process, it is also a crucial calling for the faithful to remain creative in the image and likeness of their Creator. In the discussion of the films, these links between theological/spiritual and psychological/mental health perspectives are explored with regard to both preparing for death and responding to it through joint efforts or lessons at schools. Full article

On the morning of Saturday, 7 October 2023, which was also the Jewish Festival of Simchat Torah, Israel was attacked by the Hamas terrorist organization based in the Gaza strip. The attack resulted in the murder of 1200 Israeli citizens and foreign workers, thousands were wounded, and some 250 women, men, elderly, and children were abducted, including babies of less than a year old. Hundreds were raped and all the bodies were mutilated, some beyond recognition. The extent of the attack and the extreme cruelty left Israeli citizens shocked and outraged, resulting in Israel’s involvement in the Gaza War. The current article seeks to characterize the responses of recognized influential rabbinical figures from different sectors of Israeli Orthodoxy in both the ultra-orthodox and religious Zionist sectors to these grave events, and to determine to what extent are they consistent with one of the most widely (especially on the political right) voiced secular arguments, namely that the 2005 Gaza withdrawal was one of the root causes of the October 7 massacre. Full article

Suffering and theodicy are two interconnected concepts: while the former indicates the embodied personal experience of pain, the latter represents the theological effort to explain the existence of suffering and evil by reconciling them with the idea of a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God. From a sociological perspective, the first scholar to address the problematic relationship between these two concepts was Max Weber. The problem of suffering in Weber was linked, first of all, to the process of social rationalization, that is, to the growing predominance of formal rationality in Western social life, the ultimate outcome of which he famously described through the metaphor of the “iron cage” as the existential suffering of modern Western humanity. Subsequently, in his Sociology of Religion, he adopted the concept of “disenchantment” to refer to the cultural rationalization of worldviews as a process characterizing most Asian religions within a broader universal perspective. According to Weber’s comparative investigation, at the origin of all attempts at religious rationalization lies the same universal problem of theodicy, namely the search for an explanation capable of justifying the unequal distribution of the goods of happiness among human beings and the resulting suffering, perceived as unjust. For Weber, the paradox of theodicy consists in the fact that the rationalization of thought (worldviews) and action (conducts of life), in an attempt to confer meaning on and alleviate suffering on the basis of one of the two conceptions of salvation (rebirth or redemption), instead produces the unintended consequence of making the human condition even more vulnerable to the experience of suffering, since it comes to be regarded as morally more outrageous and intellectually more unacceptable. Later, the founders of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, essentially took up and expanded the Weberian thesis of the paradox of theodicy by showing that the second disenchantment brought about by modernity affected the rationalization of metaphysical–religious worldviews through the return of the irrational mythical–magical forces that had once been subjugated and turned into myth by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, the loss of individual freedom, reduced to a mere functional response within modern political and economic bureaucratic systems, comes to coincide with the loss of meaning of any autonomous cultural framework rationally grounded in value orientations. Habermas further developed Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom by situating the process of social rationalization within a broader paradox that illustrates the contemporary inability of colonized lifeworlds, now completely bureaucratized and technicized, to confer meaning on the subjective experience of suffering. More recently, in the so-called Anthropocene, a non-linear and non-unidirectional dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment has emerged, in which the two coexist as constitutive processes of modernity, allowing the paradox of theodicy and suffering to be reconsidered in terms of a new anthropodicy. Full article

“Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor,” two adjoining chapters in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, are usually read as a contest between two theologies: theodicy and anti-theodicy, freedom and obedience, Christ and institutional power. This article reads them instead as a contest between two forms of power over human life, what Foucault called biopolitics: power directed at the life of populations rather than at territory or law. Using Foucault’s account of pastoral power as a vocabulary for care exercised over each soul and the flock as a whole, and Agamben’s analysis of how modern government inherits its structure from theological models of providence, the article argues that Ivan’s rebellion treats suffering as a scandal no providential plan can absorb, while the Inquisitor’s program turns vulnerable life into the object of administration. Ivan’s tortured children do not literally fit the Roman category of homo sacer, the figure who could be killed but not sacrificed; they occupy a structurally analogous position as lives included in creation as the price of “eternal harmony” yet excluded from any justice adequate to their suffering. The Inquisitor’s three temptations, bread, miracle, and authority, function as pillars of biopolitical rule: managing material needs, capturing consciousness, and deciding who belongs to the community. Christ’s silent kiss neither refutes nor replaces the Inquisitor’s regime; it briefly suspends the apparatus by treating the speaker as a body rather than as a function of power. Building on Solovieva’s reading of the Dostoevsky–Agamben relation, this article shifts attention from the Inquisitor as a corruption of Christianity to the Inquisitor as the limit case of pastoral care when care becomes total administration. The result is a revaluation of the Grand Inquisitor legend: Dostoevsky presents Christianity as internally exposed to the risk that solicitude, compassion, and the promise of happiness may become techniques for governing life. Full article

This paper explores the ethical implications of an ongoing debate about evolution, animal suffering, and the goodness of God. Christopher Southgate describes a “fault-line” between those who believe the struggle, suffering, and destruction of the evolutionary process are aligned with God’s good purposes in creation and those who regard these evolutionary “disvalues” as contrary to God’s good purposes. Recent efforts at dialogue across the fault line have not resolved this basic disagreement, but have achieved notable consensus on eschatology: both sides share the hope of eschatological fulfilment for other-than-human creatures and an end to the suffering, struggle, and destruction of the present age. One under-explored aspect of this dialogue is its ethical significance; since evolutionary theodicies are theological evaluations of the natural world, they should inform our understanding of what we must do in response to its struggle and suffering. Having outlined the present state of the dialogue, I consider its implications for three particular ethical issues: (1) Eating meat. Southgate and Bethany Sollereder consider meat-eating in itself ethically unproblematic, for reasons not unconnected with their evolutionary theodicies. By contrast, I argue that the eschatological hope they, like me, affirm mandates Christians to refrain from avoidable violence toward our fellow-creatures. For many westerners, “avoidable violence” includes the killing of animals for food. (2) Ending extinction. Southgate has called for humans to be “co-redeemers,” sharing with God in the healing of the evolutionary process, including efforts to combat both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic species extinction. Skeptical that humans are called to be co-redeemers, I agree that reducing anthropogenic species extinction is a proper act of repentance for the sin of ecological destruction, but am more wary of human attempts to prevent non-anthropogenic extinction. (3) Responding to pain. While I agree with Southgate and Sollereder that pain is usually biologically adaptive in this world, I refer to good scientific evidence for the existence of pain that is non-adaptive and detrimental to the flourishing of both humans and other animals. There is a prima facie ethical obligation to do what is in our power to relieve such pain. Full article

This essay confronts a classic tension: Christian tradition has long linked death in the world to human sin, yet evolutionary science reveals eons of predation, pain, and extinction preceding the emergence of Homo sapiens. In this essay, it is asked whether and how this history can be reconciled with belief in a good creation by the God who is love. After situating the stakes of this question with regard to evangelization, I examine Jesuit physicist Richard Pendergast’s ambitious proposal that fallen angels reshaped the material order and thereby seeded natural evil throughout evolutionary time. I set this account in critical conversation with major figures of the Christian tradition, including Augustine, but especially Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) and Thomas Aquinas, who—while upholding the fall and the need for redemption—locate suffering and death within natural order of creation and compatible with the divine goodness rather than as anomalies. It will be seen that Ratzinger, for his part, proposes a way to preach and live a “creation and evolution” synthesis in which the cross and resurrection illuminate, rather than erase, the hard facts of biological history. The essay concludes by assessing the metaphysical feasibility, scientific plausibility, and theological fittingness of attributing foundational and large-scale natural processes to angelic causation, noting that it risks dualism and the eclipse of creation’s fundamental goodness. Full article

This article discusses Karl Barth’s use of W.A. Mozart’s music in the doctrine of creation (in Barth’s Church Dogmatics) in relation to Mozart’s music. I propose an approach for understanding how and why Mozart’s music was able to contribute to the theological delimitation of das Nichtige, a key concept in Barth’s theodicy, in a way that Barth’s discursive argumentation could not. Scholars have discussed whether the music for Barth functions as a parable about the Kingdom of God or as a secular artistic statement that feeds into Barth’s theological argument. Whereas Barth may have used Mozart playfully in some places, he uses Mozart strictly as a secular artist in the discussion of das Nichtige. Therefore, it becomes important to establish the extent to which Barth’s use of Mozart is musically well-founded. I use recent musicological discussions of Mozart’s piano concertos as a background for my own description and close reading of the first movement of Mozart’s piano concerto K. 451 (1784), concluding that Barth’s brief and unsubstantiated description of Mozart’s music in the Church Dogmatics can be substantiated to a large extent, precisely as what Barth claimed it to be: an artistic and secular statement, not a theological one. Full article

The contemporary debate over the problem of evil in analytic philosophy of religion is prone to focusing solely on the problem as an abstract dialectical issue that only concerns philosophers. However, this focus on abstract solutions to the problem of evil can seem to be less compelling in the face of personally experienced suffering, and it has given rise to newer approaches to the problem of evil, including anti-theodicy, which is the idea that theodicy itself is morally problematic. To remedy these issues, theists must turn to rhetoric to supplement theodicy. George Campbell’s view of rhetoric provides great insights into possible solutions, showing how including biblical narratives in theodicy can provide more comprehensive and compelling explanations for why God allows evil. Full article

Recent work on theological reflection on the phenomenon of human grief has called for an apophatic posture, one that resists speaking positively about what grief is, what grief does, or where it is situated with respect to the economy of God’s works. Grief, on this account, is viewed as inaccessible to theological inquiry and illogical in nature. This essay references recent work in psychological science to offer “theological fragments” on the nature of grief with the respect to the generational self’s journey in the “time of weeping.” In so doing, it argues that an integration of theological and psychological science provides a framework for describing grief in a way that resists the temptation to ascribe positive meaning or value to it in the reconciling work of God. Full article

Since the 1980s, a theology of injustice has gained prominence in Islamic thought as a large body of literature has been written on the subject. One of the main tenets of this theology is the punishment of injustice in the afterlife, which emphasizes how unjust individuals will endure different punishments, including suffering in darkness on the Day of Resurrection. Some theologians use the divine punishment of unjust individuals in the hereafter as a rhetorical method of dissuasion from injustice in conjunction with warnings against the injustices that Muslims are currently facing or committing. Taking an ethical and normative stand, other theologians prohibit injustice, including violence against innocent people. Other Muslim theologians adopt an analytical perspective, developing concepts to understand the causes, effects, and ways to prevent injustice, including via God’s love. All theologians agree that God will punish the unjust on Earth and in the hereafter. This article discusses how injustice is explained in modern Muslim theology and closely examines and critically analyzes twelve contemporary theological Muslim texts in Arabic that have been produced in recent decades. In addition, I will place these modern theological discussions within the context of the development of modern Islamic thought and in relation to the ongoing discussions about theodicy, ethics, and the imagery of (after) death in modern society. This article argues that the theology of injustice has two purposes: it calls the unjust to accept responsibility and promises the victim delayed justice and retribution. I conclude that the punitive stance on injustice can be explained by the ongoing political and social struggles in the Muslim world as well as the spreading of traditionalist Islamic theology. Full article

Buber’s analysis of Job, offering four responses to the theodical questions that innocent suffering raises, has been highly influential since its publication in 1942, as has been Steven Kepnes’s more recent application of Buber’s analysis to the Nazi Holocaust. Each of Buber’s specific responses has been, at various points in history and today, taken up by sufferers and by those pondering suffering’s theodical implications. Yet each response retains troubling features. This article, building on Buber and Kepnes, offers an alternate reading of the Book of Job, centering on two points: (i) a possible covenantal, rather than retributive, nature of the God-Job relationship and (ii) an understanding of God’s response to Job as covenantal. This is not to suggest that such a response “solves” suffering, but it is comprehensible to Job from his own knowledge and experience of the world—an important aspect of the covenantal relationship—and is in some measure helpful. The article first reviews Kepnes’s reading of Buber, discusses four aspects of it that remain theodically troubling, and then sketches a covenantal reading of Job, drawing on the work of Edward Greenstein, Moshe Greenberg, David Burrell, Bill McKibben, Susannah Ticciati, and other more recent Jobian scholars. This discussion explores the following: (i) covenant in the Wisdom literature, (ii) a universalist reading of covenant entailing human integrity, reasoned dialogue, and the validity of human knowledge within natural, human capacity, (iii) why Job’s request to God is covenantal, and (iv) why God’s response is as well. Full article

This paper explores Carl Schmitt’s concepts of the friend and the enemy through the lens of Katechon. Contemporary scholarship often treats Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction as an occasional decision driven by political contingency. This paper refutes such a purely political reading and instead argues Schmitt’s political enemies have a deeper theological origin—Gnosticism. The Gnostics, emerging from a mistaken rejection of theodicy, developed a cosmological dualism and apocalypticism that, in the 20th century, manifested politically in the forms of liberal universalism and social pluralism. To illuminate the theological depth of Schmitt’s thought, this paper investigates a recurring yet underexplored concept—Katechon, the restrainer who holds back the end times. By linking Katechon to Schmitt’s political projects—the nomos of the earth and the decisionist state—this paper reveals the theological foundation underlying his understanding of the political: enmity is not contingent but theologically predestined by human fallenness and God’s redemptive plan. However, Schmitt’s project of political theology ends in paradox: Katechon, meant to restrain chaos, turns into its opposite owing to its intrinsic logical flaw. Full article

This article defends the idea that evil is a notion dependent on social and cultural judgment, and that in our societies, it implies the idea of free will. There is no metaphysics of evil, but rather an anthropology, a myriad of specifically human incidences linked to situations, to good or evil intentions, to specific relationships such as wars, torture, violence, rape, cruelty, abuse, and so on. Their consequences involve suffering and death, sometimes deliberately. The anthropological question of evil differs from a metaphysical conception of human nature. Full article

This article studies the Histoire critique de Jésus Christ (1770), anonymously published by the German-French atheist Paul d’Holbach, who edited, expanded, and radicalized an anonymous clandestine manuscript concerning the life of Jesus and the beginnings of his religious movement. The article analyzes how d’Holbach’s book mocks the figure of Christ, portraying the new faith as a fraudulent enterprise full of false miracles and human weaknesses. In a work where irony, humor, and ridicule are constantly used as narrative strategies, the demonological world provides opportunities for displaying multiple corrosive arguments against Christianity. After reviewing d’Holbach’s philosophical position against the existence of demons, the article studies how the devils’ role in Christian theodicy, the notion of demonic possession, and Christ’s exorcisms are ridiculed in Histoire critique as examples of irrationality, fraud, and superstition. In addition, the article will point to a contemporary debate influencing d’Holbach’s views on what he saw as the connected territories of demonology, credulity, and religious fanaticism: the controversy surrounding the 18th century convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard. This heterodox religious movement, characterized by belief in a holy man and miraculous cures, proved invaluable to d’Holbach, who maliciously compared this episode to the beginnings of the Christian movement. Full article