This year I designed and taught a number of new modules in my new job and I’ll be posting my syllabi for them over the summer while I finally get time to catch my breath and think about how to rework the modules from this year that I’ll be teaching next year, alongside planning a new undergraduate ecclesiology module and a new MA level module on mystical theology in the Abrahamic traditions that I’m really excited about, and which will be the first of the modules I’ll teach at DCU I’ve actually designed myself. This module was designed for our part time, evening BA in Theology and Religious Studies, and was taught over five weeks in 3-4 hour session. It was surprisingly fun for a module about such unrelentingly grim things. Thanks are due to various people who helped me pull this together all at quite short notice, but especially to Jake Erickson and to Anthony Paul Smith.

Week 1: What is the Problem of Evil?
This week we’ll spend some time introducing the module, beginning to think about the God question and the problem of evil. Then we’ll take a look at some of the classical Christian texts about the nature of God and evil, focusing on the excerpts from Irenaeus, Augustine and Dionysius which are this week’s required reading.

Required Reading:
 ‘Irenaeus’, ‘Augustine’ and ‘Dionysius’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.

Recommended Reading:
 ‘Job’s Question’ in Navid Kermani, The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Polity, 2011.

Week 2: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
This week we’ll think about some of the ways that classical Christian ideas about God and evil related to questions of power and violence. How did Christians think about the relationship between good and evil? How was evil understood in relation to questions of law and order? How did beliefs about hell and the devil shape how Christians thought about the societies they lived in? How did ideas about the nature of God and goodness shape how Christians thought about social, political and economic hierarchies?

Required Reading:
Armstrong, Amaryah. ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’. The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.
Kotsko, Adam, ‘The Sociopathy of the Redeemed’ extract from The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press, 2016.

Recommended Reading:
Stump, Eleonore. ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’. Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Brian Davies ed. 2012.

Week 3: Theodicy
This week we’ll look at some of the distinctive ways that the problem of suffering begins to emerge in modernity, along with new ways of thinking about the nature of God, the individual, and the foundations of social order.

Required Reading:
‘Voltaire’, ‘Hobbes’ and ‘Leibniz’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.

Recommended Reading:
‘Kant’, ‘Schopenhauer’ and ‘Hegel’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.

Week 4: Evil in God’s Name
One of the ways that evil is a problem for Christian theology is that throughout history, some Christians have done things in the name of God which other Christians have considered to be evil. This week we’ll spend some time thinking about some ways that Christians have justified inflicting suffering on other people, and reflecting on what this means for the God question and the problem of evil.

Required Reading:
Humbert of Romans, ‘Opus Tripartitum’ in Riley-Smith, Louise, and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith. ‘The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274’. 1981.

Recommended Reading:
Nigel Biggar, ‘Individual Rights versus Common Security? Christian Moral Reasoning about Torture’ in Studies in Christian Ethics 27.1 (2014), 3-10 (this nasty little piece takes a very unpleasant delight in superfluously graphic descriptions of torture and I regretted not giving my students a heads up about this earlier in the semester)

Week 5: Reconsiderations

Required Reading:
Extracts from Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job : God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis Books, 1987.

Recommended Reading:
‘God Can’t Prevent Evil’ from Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019.

General Bibliography
Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Cornell University Press, 2000.
Armstrong, Amaryah. ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’. The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.
Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. On Job : God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis Books, 1987.
Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Eerdmans, 2011.
Jantzen, Grace. Becoming Divine : Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. [Bloomington, Ind], 1999.
Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. 1973
Kermani, Navid. The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Polity, 2011.
Kilby, Karen. God, Evil and the Limits of Theology. 2020. ———. Suffering and the Christian Life. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Kitamori, Kazoh. Theology of the Pain of God: The First Original Theology from Japan. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005.
Kotsko, Adam. The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press, 2016.
Larrimore, Mark J. The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.
Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s’ On the Concept of History’. Verso Books, 2016.
McCabe, Herbert. Faith within Reason. A&C Black, 2007.
———. God Matters. A&C Black, 2005.
McGill, Arthur Chute. Suffering: A Test of Theological Method. Westminster John Knox Press, 1982.
Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019.
Pinn, Anthony B. Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999.
Riley-Smith, Louise, and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith. ‘The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274’. 1981.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2004.
Stump, Eleonore. ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’. Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Brian Davies ed. 2012.
Surin, Kenneth. Theology and the Problem of Evil. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004. Tilley, Terrence W. The Evils of Theodicy. Georgetown University Press, 1991.
Vincent, Alana M. ‘Dissenting from Redemption: Judaism and Political Theology’. European Judaism [Amsterdam], vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 32–40, https://doi.org/10.3167/ej.2017.500106.
Zizek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjevic. God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. Seven Stories Press, 2012.

Assignment
This final assignment will count for 100% of your overall mark for the module. You will be asked to write a 2500 word (+/-10%) essay in response to one of the following questions:

1. C S Lewis: “If Christianity is true then it ought to follow (a) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian. (b) That any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was”. Discuss.
2. William R Jones, “Black theology, precisely because of the prominence of ethnic suffering in the black experience, cannot operate as if the goodness of God for all mankind were a theological axiom”. Discuss.
3. Karen Kilby, “Christian theology ought neither to construct theodicies, nor ignore the kinds of problem theodicies try to address. It ought instead to acknowledge itself to be faced with questions it cannot answer.” Discuss.
4. Dorothee Soelle, ‘Any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic’. Discuss.
5. Kenneth Surin, ‘Doing theodicy … as if it were an essentially ‘theoretical’ and ahistorical activity … not only frustrates historically situated reflection on the manifold forms and occurrences of evil, but also militates against a properly Christian response to the ‘problem of evil’. EITHER discuss this claim OR pick one of the thinkers we have read over the course of the module and consider their account of evil in relation to the historical context in which they were/are writing.
6. Discuss one of the following pieces of fiction which address the problem of evil in light of the materials we have covered over the module:
   1. Ursula le Guin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas‘
   2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘The Grand Inquisitor‘
   3. Flannery O’Connor, ‘Good Country People‘
   4. W E B Du Bois, ‘Jesus Christ in Texas‘
   5. Ted Chiang, ‘Hell is the Absence of God‘
   6. A fictional text of your choosing 
7. Pick one event, recent or historical, which raises the problem of evil. What kinds of questions does this event raise about the god question and the problem of evil, and how might those questions be addressed?
8. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. If you would like to write your essay on a topic other than those set out in the questions above, you are free to do so on the condition that you a) pick a topic that will enable to you to meet the learning outcomes and b) get my approval for your chosen essay topic before you submit the essay. I’m really happy to talk over ideas with you and suggest readings etc. but you MUST get in touch with me before you submit your final essay.

If you are responding to one of the prompts which asks you to discuss a quotation, you can choose either to engage extensively with the thinker the quotation is taken from or simply to use the quotation as a way into talking about themes and ideas in the thinkers and texts we’ve studied in this module.

Your essay can draw on a mixture of texts from the module, texts from the module bibliography, and texts that you’ve found yourself. You should cite at least four scholarly sources. Your essay should use quotations as evidence, either to back up your overall argument, or to dissect in order to discuss the thinker or text you are discussing. You should not directly cite lecture materials. 

Your essay must have a thesis: a central idea or insight which is arguable (i.e. someone could disagree with it).