Member-only story
Of Horror and Hope
Calling out evil, shining a light on grace
What is evil?
What horrifies?
It’s the one-time event- the disaster, the tragedy, the emergency. It comes with a warning — a bang, a clatter, a bump in the night.
Or, as one writer notes, that’s what we’ve been taught to fear — while true evil lurks disguised as a system we are either too comfortable or complacent to try to change.
We’ve let our understanding of evil be shaped by little Linda Blair levitating above her bed in Poltergeist. We’ve learned to fear vampires and zombies and the occult. We believe evil announces its entrance with explosions and emergencies. We expect evil to shock and terrify us.
Instead, Pastor Kate suggests:
Evil is stealing bread from the hungry.
It’s weighted scales in the marketplace to cheat consumers.
It’s predatory interest rates.
It’s taking medicine from the sick.
It’s exploiting prisoners.
It’s ignoring the cries of the oppressed, or, even worse, figuring out a way to profit off of them.
And then:
But if you have a biblical worldview, you’ll recognize that evil is just more…
