Why do people fail to acknowledge the reality of evil? My progressive friends––a list which is getting shorter and shorter––were baffled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. They lacked a vocabulary and worldview to describe what happened. If British literary critic Terry Eagleton is right, there are at least three reasons for the failure to acknowledge evil: the first being a semantic divorce between “sin” and “evil,” the second being a change in the story that the West is telling itself, and the third being a suspicion about the uses of rhetoric on evil. The first two reasons signal the apatheism of our age while the last reason signals the culture wars between religious and secular humanists. With his characteristic humor and insight, Eagleton writes in his latest book:
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