God's Response to the Problem of Evil | Dr. Medi Volpe

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Dr. Medi Volpe explores God's response to the problem of evil by contrasting modern theodicy against the approach of early Christians, emphasizing the Incarnation and human action as integral to God's response.

This lecture was given on October 24th, 2024, at University of Edinburgh.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Medi Ann Volpe is a Catholic moral theologian and mother of four children, including a daughter with Down Syndrome. She is the Director of Research at Wesley House, Cambridge and teaches theology and ethics at Durham University (UK) . Her first book, Rethinking Christian Identity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), brings contemporary theological themes into conversation with voices from the classical Christian tradition. More recently, her work has explored the intersection of ecclesiology and spiritual formation, with a special interest in discipleship and Christian identity of children as well as people with intellectual disabilities. She has published in journals and handbooks, including the International Journal of Systematic Theology, Modern Theology, and the Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology (which she co-edited with Lewis Ayres). She also serves on the board of the Journal of Disability and Religion. For the last several years, Volpe has been writing and speaking about the kind of Church we must be if we are truly to honour the weaker members. Her current book project (Living as the Body of Christ) considers ecclesiology from the perspective of disability.

Keywords: Augustine, Evil, Gustavo Gutierrez, Hume, James Cone, Incarnation, Irenaeus, Problem of Evil, Tolkien, Theodicy, Theology

Transcript

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0:39.7	Welcome to the Thomistic Institute.org slash MA-M-A.Scholarships. Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual
0:44.9	tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this
0:49.7	podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
1:00.6	I know it's kind of a weird thing to do, but I want to dedicate this lecture to Gustavo Gutierrez, who died on Tuesday to the memory of Gustavo Gutierrez, Dominican, partly because it was reading this book that changed the way
1:13.5	I thought about this topic.
1:14.5	So this is his on Job more later on that.
1:18.5	So may he rest in peace.
1:21.0	Right.
1:22.6	So what is God's response to the problem of evil?
1:30.2	This lecture is the fruit of years of teaching a course at Durham University entitled God and evil, as is often the way of such things at
1:35.2	universities like Durham, I inherited a module designed by another. It was set up gently to disabuse
1:42.1	students of the notion that the so-called problem of evil
1:44.7	could be solved theoretically. The trouble with it, as I found, was that the gentle approach
1:50.1	left intact the main obstacle to thinking theologically about evil. The modern enterprise
	...

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