Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope Postsecular Meditations [Paperback]

No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuat?k considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuat?k maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where the language of hope, forgiveness, redemption, and love can take us beyond unspeakable harm and irreparable violence. Drawing upon the work of Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, this work is written as a series of meditations. Matuat?k presents a bold new way of dealing with one of humanity's most intractable problems.

In a world filled with war, torture, and cruelty, where millions of people die of diseases related to malnutrition or inadequate health care each year, Martin Beck Matuat?k's book is an important and innovative inquiry into an age-old problem.This book deserves a large and thoughtful readership. . . . the insights are worth the effort.May 13, 2009 (online)

Martin Beck Matuat?k is Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Religion at Arizona State University. He is author of J?rgen Habermas: Philosophical-Political Profile and Specters of Liberation. He has edited (with Merold Westphal) Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (IUP, 1995).

Acknowledgments
Part 1. Impossible Hope
1. Job at Auschwitz
2. Redemptive Critical Theory
3. Between Hope and Terror
Part 2. The Negatively Saturated Phenomenon
4. Job Questions Kant
5. Redemption in an Antiredemptory Age
6. Radical Evil as a Saturated Phenomenon
Part 3. The Uncanny
7. The Unforgivable
8. Tragic Beauty
9. The Unspeakable
10. Without a Why
Epilogue: Job Questions the Grand Inquisitor
Notes
Works Cited
Index