so fascinating and alluring to the human mind while good seems so
uninteresting and boring? Does evil serve some purpose, or does it
just happen? Why has the human race not seemed able to understand
evil, to conquer it, to shut it out?

Thoughtful people raise penetrating questions about evil and seek to
understand what it reveals about the human condition. In a feature arti-
cle in the New York Times Magazine, Ron Rosenbaum seeks to probe
the meaning of evil. The cover of the magazine reads "Evil's Back," and
Rosenbaum article inside carries the title "Staring into the Heart of
the Heart of Darkness." Rosenbaum's piece sets the stage by recounting
how Susan Smith of Buffalo, South Carolina, murdered her two young
sons. He rehearses the facts that a whole nation now knows all too well:
Susan Smith drowned her two little boys by strapping them into the
child safety seats in her Mazda and sending the car rolling down an em-
bankment into John D. Long Lake. She then manufactured an "ordeal"
to deflect attention from her crime. Playing on racial prejudice, she
claimed that an African American car jacker had kidnapped her two chil-
dren, and she pled desperately on television for a search for the car
jacker and the children. Yet, within nine days, she confessed to killing
three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex.

Rosenbaum observes that one local tabloid called Smith's action an
"evil deed." What is impressive about this pronouncement is that the
secular news media would make it. In a day when electronic and
printed media typically prefer to assume a "relativity of values"--
avoiding difficult issues about morality, theology, the meaning of life,
and our place in the cosmos--it was blurted out. There it was. Some-
thing was actually declared "evil"--pure, unadulterated, unmistak-
able evil--by the press. Now all the hard questions are laid on the
table and have to be faced: What is evil? Why do humans have the
seemingly vast capacity to harm others? If there is a good God, why
does he permit innocent people to suffer? ²

There is something about the Susan Smith case that evokes our
harshest moral judgments and gets us asking all of those hard ques-
tions. Rosenbaum cannily observes that "the great tabloid stories are
the ones that raise theological questions." Yet he quickly acknowl-
edges that we cannot talk about evil--or about good, for that mat-
ter--without some definitions. Those definitions lead us to larger
theories about the origin and existence of evil in our midst, and those
theories lead us to even larger conceptions of the meaning of life and
the nature of whatever Supreme Being might exist. ³

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