Perhaps, with the departure of the Bush Administration, the withdrawal of American combat units from Iraqi cities, the attention of the new President shifted to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, and the public worried about jobs and houses, Iraq can start to become a real war, not a symbol of all-consuming evil — the subject of movies that try to be good movies rather than major statements.
And evil is a subject for art.
And if it is difficult to ascribe specific neural circuits to empathy or psychopathy, what of even more fluid concepts such as love, or evil, or – the subject of Lehrer's new book – "creativity"?
Although the problem of evil is the subject of another entry (see the entry on The Problem of Evil), the relevant point for the topic of heaven is just this: One need not think of heaven (or the coming age, as the Gospel writers sometimes refer to it) as a static ethereal realm in which there is nothing to do.
This is the lesser evil, lesser than subjecting Syria and Yemen to another year of horrific tragedies.
But the subject of evil is now becoming the focus of unusual attention.
Goffard seems to encourage an almost mythical impression of his subject's evil.
Judas, Christianity's primary image of human evil, is now the subject of a rehabilitation effort.
Nina Porter is being driven to distraction by her husband Robert's self-righteous rants on the subject of evil bankers and corrupt politicians.
The book's major undoing, however, is that neither Bennet nor Charles has anything insightful to say on the subject of evil.
