Good and Evil After Auschwitz

Book excerpt: Good and Evil After Auschwitz is a compendium of the papers presented at an extraordinary symposium convened at the Vatican in 1998. It represents the views of more than thirty of the world's foremost theologians and religious thinkers on the inescapable moral question of our era, the problem of how, if at all, believers can reconcile their faith in a just and merciful God with the mass murder of millions of innocents during the Holocaust. Although the symposium took place in the Vatican, it gave voice to the thought and anguish of Jewish and Protestant thinkers as well as Roman Catholics. The participants came from many different countries and include many individuals well known in European intellectual and philosophical circles. The volume includes an interview with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and excerpts from the writings of Moshe Flinker, Etty Hillesum, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Good and Evil After Auschwitz is a powerful and thought-provoking book. The profoundly moving contributions by the symposium participants can serve as signposts to guide us in the effort to confront the awesome questions posed by the Holocaust, even as they remind us that no human answer can possibly be adequate to its enormity.