ABSTRACT
This essay details the author's experiences as a medical director at Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Richmond, Virginia, the first nursing home to have a COVID-19 outbreak in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It explores how the deaths of his patients challenged his faith and raised issues of theodicy. Ultimately, the author does not ask for an explanation of evil, but urges us to examine our culpability and our responsibility, then listen to Jesus's call to repentance (Luke 13:1–5). In the end, our light, as weak as it is, must persist in the darkness.
ABSTRACT
Catastrophes such as natural disasters, conflicts, and epidemics bring difficulties and misfortunes, but people also retain hope. The recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has tested people on what they feel and are reliant on, particularly their beliefs. It is intriguing to examine the perspectives of a community with strong religious beliefs during this pandemic. In this article, we explore the religious perspectives of Sharia-based communities in Aceh Province, Indonesia, on the origin and meaning of the pandemic, which might affect their belief systems. We limited our critical assessment to philosophical theodicies and the shift in rationalizing the outbreak. Our study revealed how the virus triggered people to integrate logic with spiritual thoughts. Data were retrieved from twenty informants with various backgrounds to sample a cross-section of perspectives. During the difficult days of the epidemic, people pondered ‘who' and ‘why', which led them to think about theodicy, which we used as the basis for our research. By utilizing a narrative inquiry, three premises were classified: COVID-19 is God's doing, COVID-19 is not an intervention of God, and COVID-19 is still controlled by God, not other factors. The first premise turned out to be the dominant one, being based on the locals' strong belief in the omnipotence of God. This reveals a widespread understanding of the origin of the pandemic that can be compared with other systems of meaning in different religions. © 2023 Ulster Institute for Social Research. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Each chapter takes as its object of analysis either a pair (for example, Bayle and Malebranche, Leibniz and King, Voltaire and the Deists) or an individual (Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer) who participated in the tradition of theodicean thinking or its critique. Taking the present conditions of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Uprisings in the spring and summer of 2020, and the conceptual framings of tracking-capitalism, ecological collapse, and civil war as his subject matter, he paints a pessimistic picture of the futureless futures and impersonal dominations of the contemporary globalized world. [...]to what extent was it even conceived as a real problem?" (29) Whereas optimists are only interested in the problem of evil in its relationship with good (or God), van der Lugt's value-oriented pessimists reject the necessity of alignment, instead taking reality as it is, discontent, dread, and all. Through King and Liebniz the reader is provided a foundation for Enlightenment optimism that adjusts the Augustinian thesis of responsibility. While King's contribution is given its due, van der Lugt defines optimism by Leibniz's foundation of modern theodicy in his assertion that "we live in 'the best of all possible worlds'" (69): that there is, at the very least, a justification of evil in the world in relation to the good—either through theodicy in that the evil serves the good, or through alignment in that the good outweighs the evil. [...]with the question of whether life is worth living, van der Lugt explains that "the deeper point [schopenhauer] is trying to make […] is that even if the goods of life vastly outweigh the evils, even so, this does nothing to justify existence" (348).
ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the rise of what is understood to be a global techno-theodicy. Recognizing the pandemic of 2020 as representing the first crisis of the post-liberal order, it maps out the changing nature of religious power as it relates to the appropriation of the , from earlier claims on the monotheistic God to the powers of salvation and redemption invested in technology today. Technology in these terms is no longer seen as enabling, let alone a tool for advancing or progressing the lived conditions of life on earth. Nor can it further be seen as an integral force that shapes being in the world alone. It's now presented to us as the only thing which could save a fragile and broken humanity from itself. This has been achieved by collapsing the human into the species, collapsing the species into nature, and collapsing nature into the technological in such a way that there remains no distinction. This results in an outright assault on the poetic sensibility and the art of possibility. Moreover, it also reaches further into the philosophy of death and the remaining frontiers yet to be colonized.
ABSTRACT
This article attempts to answer the question of God's compassion during and after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Many people are asking questions about God's care and love amid situations where they could not mourn the loss of the loved ones and find closure. African philosophy of death, mourning rituals and funeral ceremonies were curtailed or restricted by the government and therefore, mourners were left with wounds because they could not find closure for the loss of their loved ones. The aim is to point out that people are still mourning, as lockdown restrictions limited them from going through a grieving process, and that people, left with post-corona effects, are still asking the reality of God's presence during times filled with pain. The interdisciplinary approach to the reality of situation, press releases and literature review are all combined to locate theodicy during the periods of pain. It is discovered that many who did not mourn and grieve culturally and religiously are still struggling emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Bereavement processes that were muzzled, can still be addressed theologically. Theodicy, as a theological concept, is utilised as a tool to strengthen faith and hope. Hope remains an anchor that keeps humanity floating above the circumstances. Eschatological hope remains the pillar when COVID-19 is deemed as a contradiction to the goodness of God. The conclusion is that, although the character of God such as love, kindness, empathy et cetera, is questioned, the reassuring message remains that God continues to comfort, guide and heal despite crises facing humanity. Humanity still needs post-grief healing and closure in order to reimagine and reassert normality of life. Contribution: The author aims to highlight the importance of healing during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and how to answer the question of theodicy during the crises. How does one reconcile the goodness of God and the devastation of a pandemic during and after sufferings the world has experienced when one's socio-cultural structures are challenged?
ABSTRACT
The enormous impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused Indonesian Christian leaders and theologians to become preoccupied with theodicy-humanistic questions rather than considering the rights of life for biodiversity. This is unacceptable because humans are not the only living things with the right to life and are entitled to God's justice in all-natural disasters. According to biologists and epidemiologists, the pandemic sends a message of ecological injustice. Therefore, by using a method of reading with a perspective of biological diversity, this research argues that humans and other living things have a right to God's justice amid disasters. The Indonesian spirituality of biological diversity, which is in line with the gratitude of Francis of Assisi and Calvin's idea of living in a church that considers God's justice for all creation, can serve as an epistemological foundation for developing theodicy-ecological ecclesiology.
ABSTRACT
Microbiology's ecological turn, as it shifts its gaze from the individual microbe to the entanglement and ubiquity of microbial life, is transforming conceptions of human nature and disease in the sciences and humanities. Both the fields of Christian theological anthropology and medical anthropology are tuning in to these microbiological shifts for their reformative possibilities. Meanwhile, practical resistance to these shifts in recent pandemic responses suggest that forces greater than just the "pure science" of microbiology are informing attachments to hyper-modern or Pasteurian epidemiologies and radically independent, buffered views of the self. This essay explores the roots of such resistance. It investigates the interplay of shifts in theological anthropology and disease theories. Cultural anthropology and critical studies offer accounts of epidemiology's fraught relationship to a history of colonialism, racialization, and vilification of pathogens and pathogenicized humans. This essay adds a theological analysis of the historical entanglement of perspectives on disease and Christian doctrine, which bears on the present pandemic response. It illuminates the ways some Christians "benefit" from germ theory's influence. Germ theory interrupts key Christian doctrine (especially theodicy) that makes Christian theology resistant to relational accounts of being human. Germ theory's theological reshaping of Christian teaching may also encourage the current resistance to more relational pandemic responses known as One Health strategies. While reformative and more realistic possibilities of emergent and entangled multispecies accounts of humanity's microbiality are ample and apt, they must account for the ways in which microbiology has never been epidemiological without also being colonial and theological. In other words, this essay explores the smallest and most reviled "animals" in relationship to Christian conceptions of sin, contagion, and evil as groundwork for engaging humanity's micro-animality and diseases' relational aspects. To conclude, I offer four modest suggestions.
ABSTRACT
This article aims to present how the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas understands the issues of suffering and evil in the world, hardships frequently considered as obstacles to the belief in God. Breaking away from the logic of theodicies, the French-Lithuanian philosopher developed original and instigating perspectives on these themes, placing them in an eminently ethical domain. It concerns an ethic that escapes reciprocity, in a context of asymmetry, with the granting of absolute priority to the other man. Such reflections are particularly relevant in the dramatic scenario established by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has given rise to suffering, death, and several uncertainties, among which the narrative of God. The new coronavirus has sparked a crisis of global dimensions, which raises the need for a new civilizational paradigm, prioritizing principles such as cooperation, human solidarity and ethical responsibility towards others, a horizon in which Levinas' conceptions are included.