WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?

This course is an introduction to the field of inquiry called The Problem of Evil, or Theodicy – that is, the investigation of God in the face of evil and suffering in the world.  How do we justify God? How do we reconcile disaster, pain, and suffering with an all-good, all-knowing, all-compassionate God?   This question arises in all religious traditions, but here we will study only four: the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu traditions, each of which proposes its own array of answers. Our emphasis will be on primary texts from each tradition, with introductory and interpretive secondary sources brought in as supplementary.  These primary sources will be discussed in class, but especially in required section meetings.  A sub-theme of the course is the “pastoral” dimension of answers to the Problem of Evil: to what extent are the answers we study comforting?  This course has been created with the many crises presently afflicting our world – COVID-19, climate change, and the injustice of racism, to name a few – in mind.