This issue of The Other Journal aims to address the topic of evil, both with regard to its obvious manifestations and its haunting opacity. At times our contributors lament the presence of evil and at times they call us to work against it. At times they analyze the Christian response to evil, critiquing it and offering some correctives, and at times they merely try to bring evil’s more insidious or systemic forms to light. These essays, interviews, poems, and short stories resist easy definitions and explication. They suggest that evil is not always as easy to name as we Christians might think and that we may even, at times, be its willing and unwilling accomplices.
Using the Seven Deadly Sins as a template, two college professors explore the impulses which lay at the heart of academic plagiarism.
In his most recent book, N. T. Wright captures the integration of politics and theology in the Gospels, but his framing of the argument proves problematic on the question of Christianity’s creedal tradition.
In “Longing,” Maryann Hannan examines the contrast between a psalm’s proclamation of trust and her own unending spiritual desires.
Von Balthasar’s theology of the Trinity provides a compelling framework in which Christians can engage the problem of evil, including its recent formulations by the New Atheism.
When violence strikes a church on a Sunday morning, it challenges us to question the meaning of hell and the power of love.
In “Enduring Freedom,” Brian Volck brings us to war-torn Afghanistan, where a mother sees “evidence of things unhoped for: an arm, half a foot, an ear.”
In this piece, Paul Hobbs explores the difference between seeing humanity as interconnected and seeing humanity as a number of disposable and replaceable units.
In this article, William Dyrness responds to Robert Covolo and Cory Willson’s attempt to position themselves between theological account of culture and cultural practices outlined in James K. A. Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom and Dyrness’s book Poetic Theology.
In “The Canyon, Age 8,” the poet Timothy E. G. Bartel describes a certain coming-of-age brush with a minor sin, one that leaves him “tasting his new words.”
