stories on Evil

The man who prosecuted the infamous Manson family for their murders later wrote a book titled Helter Skelter. This phrase was taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Manson...

Sometimes evil can feel so strong, so powerful, that its damage seems permanent and the final word on the subject. In this short excerpt from Philip Yancey, we see a reversal, perhaps a foretaste of w...

Jesus warns against greed and seeking wealth, because ultimately, money is fiction. Gold coins? Slips of paper? Ones and zeroes in a computer? They only have value because people think they do....

In this stirring and thoughtful argument, N.T. Wright illustrates the complexity of evil by telling the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his return to his home country of Russia after many years in...

While the illustration is somewhat dated, it brings up some of the crucial issues related to a modern approach to the subject of evil: Several television specials have been broadcast [on the subject...

At the end of the first Harry Potter book, J. K. Rowling has a puppet of the Dark Lord Voldemort say, “Lord Voldemort showed me . . . there is no good and evil, there is only power.” I think Rowling i...

A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing...

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

Adolf Eichmann was one of the Nazi architects of the Holocaust who escaped after World War II to South America, where he was caught in 1960 and taken back to Israel for a trial. He was tried, found gu...

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

W.H. Auden is one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, who grew up in England but who spent some of his life in the United States. In November 1939 he found himself in a German-language movie th...

One of the most powerful illustrations of grace and mercy in all of western literature has to be the great scene between Monseigneur Bienvenu and Jean Valjean in the stirring epic Les Miserables by Vi...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...