On Evil and Suffering

TTF Staff

The problem of evil and suffering is addressed in our curriculum, But Not Through Me, edited by Os Guinness. Dr. Guinness has also expanded on the underlying argument of this curriculum in his book, Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror. These resources will also be of interest—and hopefully comfort—to people who want to pursue this topic further.

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Nonfiction

• Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell, 1986, 2000.
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Penguin 2000. [also available as an e-text]
• Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. W. H. Freeman & Company, 1996.
• Peter Gage, Eleni, Ballantine 1996.
• Philip Gourevich, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
• Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Little, Brown, 1995.
• Os Guinness, Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life. Doubleday/Waterbrook, 2001.
• Philip Hallie, In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm. HarperCollins, 1997.
• Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
• Peter Kreeft, Making Sense Out of Suffering. Servant Books, 1986.
• Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes: Life As Vanity; Job: Life As Suffering; Song of Songs, Life As Love, Ignatius Press, 1989
• C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. Harper San Francisco, 1960, 2001.
• Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper Perennial, 1974.
• Jeffrie G. Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits. Oxford, 2003
• Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2002.
• Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
• Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust. Princeton, 1999.
• Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son. Eerdmans, 1987, 1995.
• Philip Yancey, Where Is God When it Hurts? Zondervan, 2001.

Fiction

• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, HarperPerennial, 1927.
• Reinhold Schneider, “Telling Truth to Kings,” The Trinity Forum Reading, Fall 1998 (an excerpt from Imperial Mission [Gresham Press, 1948], the English translation of Las Casas von Karl V).

Movies

• Eleni, directed by Peter Yates,1985, based on the book by Peter Gage.
• The Quarrel, directed by Eli Cohen, 1991.
• Weapons of the Spirit, directed by Pierre Sauvage, 1987. A movie about the village of Le Chambon.

Internet Resources

• Professor Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Contains an informative multimedia slide show and further reading on this famous experiment.
• The website for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
• The full text, with illustrations, of Henry Morgenthau’s 1918 book, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, on the Armenian holocaust, the first modern holocaust, perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire.

Lists, Good and Evil, Tue 10 Jan 2006