It is with a bemused pen that I report the passing of John Grady, the director of La Salle University’s Honors Program. Rightfully considered a pioneer of honors programs among small liberal arts colleges, for 34 years Mr. Grady was a major influence on the careers and lives of hundreds of La Salle graduates — myself (proudly) included. As with the passing of Dr. Michael Kerlin, a professor whom I deeply loved, Mr. Grady’s abscence will take some time to fathom.
Other weblogs covering Mr. Grady’s passing:
- Chevron Says… (and a memorial, “The Devout Educator,” available here)
- Perpetual Priest
- The Expatriate
CyberChaikhana sample chapter and chapters list
13 July, 2008
Well, for the next ten days I’m going to be relatively out of communication as I pour myself back into my thesis work. Rest assured, I will be getting to all of your comments and e-mails as soon as I have a free neuron.
In the meantime, I’ve published a sample chapter from CyberChaikhana: Digital Conversations from Central Asia, as well as a revised list of the chapter headings and foci’s, over at the neweurasia subsite. Additionally, yesterday I put up two academic papers from 2007, “The Search for the Historical Socrates: Was Socrates a Failure?” and “The Search for the Historical Confucius: How Knightly was Confucius?” And of course there’s “The Historian’s Theodicy.” As always, feel free to peruse my archives and comment as you please.
One more thing: for the Americanists among you, check out The Expatriate weblog. You won’t be disappointed!
The Historian’s Theodicy
10 July, 2008
“The problem of evil.” Theologians and philosophers couldn’t have found a staler term to categorize the spiritual and intellectual catastrophe that is the question, “Where was God…?”
Where was God during Deir ez-Zor, Auschwitz, Darfur, and September 11th? Where is God when everyday people suffer and die from the most banal of causes. A non-stick frying pan, when scratched and heated, releases brain-damaging lethal fumes — where the hell is God in that? Imagine! The creator of the universe’s very existence challenged by kitchenware, and the best response Mankind’s thinkers can conjure is the crossword puzzle-sounding “problem of evil.”
The term I prefer is “theodicy”; the word’s Greek origin has an appropriately menacing sound. Yet, when I take a moment to examine the word’s etymology I find it nearly as insufficient as “the problem of evil.” It comes from the Greek θεός (theós, “god”) and δίκη (díkē, “justice”), meaning literally “the justice of God,” but more accurately rendered as “to justify God” or “the justification of God.” It was coined in 1710 by the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz. You may recall him as the fellow who believed ours is “the best of all possible worlds.”
The problems with theodicy are immediately apparent, loaded as it is with innumerable assumptions. One assumption is the very goodness of God; another is whether it is the divine, not humanity, who is in need of justification. And of course the most fundamental assumption is that God even exists (but that’s a topic for another reflection — for the sake of this essay, and out of respect for my own spiritual experiences, I’m going with the belief that some kind of divinity does exist). However, the most problematic assumptions are (a) that there’s a flawless divine plan, much less total divine mastery over events, and (b) that events are assailable as either “good” or “evil.” At the root of both these assumptions are the ideas of certainty and necessity, and the question of the relation between suffering and divine intention.
For these reasons I propose that the entire concept of theodicy be gutted and rebooted. How? By dropping talk of “good” and “evil,” eviscerating the gibberish of what we mean when we say “God,” and then asking a new question, one about the relation of chance and divine decisions. In other words, let’s be historians about our faith, and ask: how do we reconcile belief in God with contingency and change? The answer I propose: God is a storywriter, and we are partners in the plot. This is the core analogy of what I call “post-monotheist theodicy.”
