Christian spirituality implies confrontation with a broadly imagined, wide-ranging, and persistent category of evil. These traditions have commonly interpreted this confrontation as generative of self-development or transformation. This struggle, though difficult, facilitates spiritual growth amid temptations towards complacency. However, this path of self-transformation, or metanoia, risks inappropriately justifying the experience of evil in its self-reflections. What resources can Christian spiritual traditions marshal to contend with the overt and covert or banal presence of evil? And how can they do so without trying to make the absurdity of evil intelligible?
The Christian tradition is called to develop more robust and sensitive ways to approach evil as an enduring locus of theological indefinition and inadequacy. This essay takes up this task by reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which depicts human cruelty without clarifying whether these representations function within a larger thematic structure; most scholars interpret the novel as amoral or nihilistic. I demonstrate the inverse: that Blood Meridian’s profound moral-theological vision is founded upon its commitment to evil’s illegibility. By highlighting its close intertextual relationship with the Book of Job, and the performative function of the novel’s interpretive difficulty as a mirror of the ethical-spiritual struggle for an orientation towards evil amidst divine absence, I argue that McCarthy follows Job in affirming that theodicy cannot be realized as a rational proposition, but it can be literally realized, made real, in practice.
Martial imagery appears to favor the language of fighting evil, resisting evil, and defeating evil, but arguably the focus of Christianity is the transformation of evil. The present paper aims to recover the language of martial metaphors for the purpose of transforming evil by examining the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) and Chen Weiming (陳微明 1881-1958), two fighters intent on spiritual development. The comparison yields a fresh look at martial training as a means for the transformation of evil. A comparative reading of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises with Chen’s martial practice serves to revive Loyola’s martial tradition in Christian spirituality. Far from proposing a recipe for Christian triumphalism or militarism, the reading demonstrates that the transformation of evil in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises can be deepened through martial practice.
This paper offers possibilities for a baptismal ecospirituality that reclaims baptized persons as earth creatures, submerges them in the suffering of all creation (human and more than human), and equips them to recognize and articulate diverse forms of evil as a way of practicing resistance.
This paper investigates the “Paradox of Friction”: the tension between the necessity of struggle for moral formation and the traditional ideal of a "frictionless" teleological end. While the virtue tradition, beginning with Aristotle’s notion of enkrateia, often frames friction as a temporary instrument to be outgrown, this paper challenges the desirability of a totally frictionless state. By re-examining the “rest” of the heavenly beatific vision, through the lens of a New Creation, I argue for an eschatological ideal defined not by the absence of resistance, but by a “friction without suffering.” In this view, friction is not a sign of imperfection to be bypassed, but a constitutive element of finite creaturely life, even in its glorified state.