| NEW YORK — The questions are as old as life itself: “Why is there evil, why is there suffering, why is there adversity in the world?”
The answers to the questions posed by Jewish scholar Jon Levenson, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, were, as always, difficult to come by.
But Levenson, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Christian and Muslim scholars and writers who addressed the subject of evil and its contemporary manifestations at the 35th national conference of the Trinity Institute did so in the hope that an interfaith dialogue could help the contemporary world “name evil” and perhaps act on it.
In his keynote address of the May 2-4 May event, “Naming Evil,” at Trinity Church in New York, Annan said he was often reluctant to use the word “evil” because “it’s too absolute. It seems to cut off any possibility of redemption, of dialogue, or even co-existence. It is the moral equivalent of declaring war.”
However, the U.N. chief spoke candidly about his experience of coming “face to face” with evil in the world when he served as head of peacekeeping for the United States during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia.
He said that in each situation, U.N. peacekeeping troops were on the ground in the very places where “genocidal acts” were committed.
“In both cases, I had subsequently to examine my conscience as did many others who were involved,” said Annan. “All of us had to ask what more we might have done and why we did not do more to stop this horror in its tracks, or better still, before it started.”
Among the conclusions: “We had an institutional ideology of impartiality even when confronted with attempted genocide,” he said. “In other words, we were reluctant to face up to evil when we saw it.”
Annan, a Christian from Ghana, said one of the lessons from those experiences was that in some cases “impartial peacekeepers or peacemakers are no longer the answer,” and “force has to be met with force, which means, dare I say it, that evil has to be met with evil.”
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University in Washington DC, warned against the tendency towards absolutism and intolerance he sees in both Islam and Christianity ¾ warnings that had special significance as Trinity Church is just blocks away from the World Trade Center site destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001.
And poignancy hung in the air as Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and author, almost seemed to be speaking about the U.S. war in Iraq as she recalled the historical context of the times of Jesus.
“At a time when the then-Imperial government was absorbing and breaking and intimidating people everywhere, the challenge Jesus the liberator gave from the top of that mountain was not to flee the field in the name of distant, insulted innocence, and not to hide behind our good intentions,” she noted.
“The challenge, he said, is to stay in the midst of the struggle, as he did, and speak a prophet’s speech, as he did, as the old world crumbled around him and the new one struggled, struggled, struggled to rise,” Chittister said. “They call that moment now the giving of the Beatitudes, and they plaster it over with pious platitudes. I call it the ‘Constitution of the Good in Confrontation with Evil.’”
The co-sponsors of the event were the Parish of Trinity Church, a prominent Episcopal (Anglican) church in New York City, and the Chautauqua Institution, an educational center located in New York state.
|
