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75 x in the previous chapter, we focused on how the believer might well view life with regard to the reality of power. We wrote of how the person of faith with a logic of hope might “look out” at/to the environing world, how she might look upon her own self. We called for the courage to believe, for faith in the face of our finitude. I will not abandon that call in what I write here. But I am aware of something that is missing in that call to believe and even in the earnest effort to follow that call, as we look out from our position in the middle of things. Something is missing because life in the middle won’t hold still; the middle is life on the move. Faith calls us to be part of making a difference in the minutes and decades that propel the one-looking-out into some kind of future. So the call is not simply to “look” at the self and the world from the best viewing distance, as it were. We are not comfortably seated in a theater, watching from a distance the action featuring the performers on the stage before us. We are called to “perform,” to act. The call is to live into that world, as surely as self and world refuse to stay neatly apart and unrelated. The call cannot be to “live into” without any more specific direction. Following such a general imperative could yield simply a weary (and wearying) activist who settles for a sort of cumulative or quantitative presence without definition. Without further specificity, the frenetic actions might simply cancel each other out. But specific direction is hard to come by. Given the Chapter 4 to live, against evil: the power oF love For and with the other(s) 76 love’s availing power complexity and plurality of the condition(s) in which we find ourselves, a unifying direction seems available only in safely abstract terms. But is our principle to be only as materially uninformative as, say, that the principle of our acting must be universalizable? If the calling into the world does not always itself yield clarifying definition, there is nonetheless something in the world and in the self that calls for action quite urgently and specifically. I write now not of finitude, but of moral evil. Looking back to the nineteenth century, we know with and from Native Americans something of the Trail of Tears on this continent. Wounded Knee follows quickly on December 19, 1890. Europe’s twentieth century has the enduring witness to the Holocaust, despite desperate , literally incredible, denials. And the twenty-first century has candidates of contemporary horror: the name Darfur takes its place alongside Auschwitz and Wounded Knee in the legacy of evil these last centuries have generated. We have written of how viewing finitude calls for a significant measure of acceptance of the limitations that come part and parcel with creaturely life. But these names—Auschwitz, Wounded Knee, Darfur—surely do not call for acceptance. Ambiguities can be found even here, of course, but we are driven to ask: Is there not something that we can do so that such realities never happen again? These names carry concrete meaning and fail to fade into abstractions. We sense a call to live against evil. Seeing things better, more clearly, does not necessarily yield making things better. We need to move from seeing to changing what is there to be seen. That movement is spurred also by the frustrations we experience even in the work of seeing better. There is a keen sense that the call to trust and faith runs up against difficulties that resist resolution. We have already pondered in the preceding chapter’s reflections on “Ambiguity and Audacity ” what one might call the “whence” of evil. We have tried to understand how things are with the Creator and the creatures such that the limitations of finitude and the aberrations of evil come to be. In that pondering, we have repaired to the freewill defense and paired that with a free-process defense, in which the universe joins the human creature in being granted a certain independence. But there are unsatisfied questions. Many of them cluster around the peril of human freedom. How free are we, really? How is it that I know the good quite clearly at times yet do not do it? As for the free-process part of the pairing, what...

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