Why Evil Exists - Post WWII Jewish Thought on Evil

Post WWII Jewish Thought on Evil

This is a one-hour weekly meeting that meets every Sunday morning. Plato's Cave and University UUS Inquiring Minds members are welcome to participate.

This Sunday morning, May 6 at 9:00, Plato’s Cave and Inquiring Minds will watch the 31st video lecture from the series “Why Evil Exists” titled “Jewish Thought on Evil". (See description below) We will be alternating this series on a weekly basis with “The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida” (see previous meetups). Each lecture is about 30 minutes which gives adequate time for us to discuss the lecture’s main points during the hour. Join us if you can. If you find yourself running late for the meetup please enter quietly when you arrive and be seated. Coffee? Yes.

Dr. Charles Mathewes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches religious ethics, theology, and philosophy of religion. He earned his B.A. in Theology from Georgetown University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from the University of Chicago.

Why do humans do evil? What is behind "man's inhumanity to man," the troubling fact of human actions that produce suffering and destruction? Is it ultimately a spiritual or cosmic problem? Is it a consequence of social systems or power structures? Or is it some inner deficit of human nature, lurking in the shadow world of our psychology? Why, in the end, does evil exist?

The "problem of evil" is one of the oldest and most fundamental concerns of human existence. Since ancient times, questions surrounding evil have preoccupied every major religion, as well as many of history's greatest secular thinkers, from early philosophers to contemporary social theorists.

A Question at the Heart of Human Existence Covering nearly 5,000 years of human history and invoking the perspectives of many of the West's most brilliant minds, Why Evil Exists probes intimately into how human beings have conceived of evil, grappled with it, and worked to oppose it.With Professor Mathewes's inspired guidance, you engage with how both individual thinkers and larger trends of thought have faced evil, studying the work of major theologians, philosophers, poets, political theorists, novelists, psychologists, and journalists.

36 lectures | 31 minutes each

1 The Nature and Origins of Evil

2 Enuma Elish—Evil as Cosmic Battle

3 Greece—Tragedy and The Peloponnesian War

4 Greek Philosophy—Human Evil and Malice

5 The Hebrew Bible—Human Rivalry with God

6 The Hebrew Bible—Wisdom and the Fear of God

7 Christian Scripture - Apocalypse and Original Sin

8 The Inevitability of Evil—Irenaeus

9 Creation, Evil, and the Fall—Augustine

10 Rabbinic Judaism—The Evil Impulse

11 Islam—Iblis the Failed, Once-Glorious Being

12 On Self-Deception in Evil—Scholasticism

13 Dante - Hell and the Abandonment of Hope

14 The Reformation—The Power of Evil Within

15 Dark Politics—Machiavelli on How to Be Bad

16 Hobbes - Evil as a Social Construct

17 Montaigne and Pascal—Evil and the Self

18 Milton—Epic Evil

19 The Enlightenment and Its Discontents

20 Kant—Evil at the Root of Human Agency

21 Hegel: The Slaughter Block of History

22 Marx—Materialism and Evil

23 The American North and South—Holy War

24 Nietzsche—Considering the Language of Evil

25 Dostoevsky—The Demonic in Modernity

26 Conrad—Incomprehensible Terror

27 Freud—The Death Drive and the Inexplicable

28 Camus—The Challenge to Take Evil Seriously

29 Post–WWII Protestant Theology on Evil

30 Post–WWII Roman Catholic Theology on Evil

31 Post–WWII Jewish Thought on Evil - The Holocaust radically challenged Jewish conceptions of evil, faith, and identity. Grapple with four major Jewish thinkers, confronting the apparent death of the God of the covenant, as they urge profound questioning, new understandings of faith, and a turning to fellow humans to find meaning in healing the world.

32 Arendt—The Banality of Evil

33 Life in Truth—20th-Century Poets on Evil

34 Science and the Empirical Study of Evil

35 The "Unnaming" of Evil

36 Where Can Hope Be Found?

See course review at:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/why-evil-exists.html

-Steve, Plato's Cave Organizer