Moby-Dick and Twenty-First Century Theodicy
This essay examines Moby-Dick as a mid-nineteenth-century fictional response to the Christian tradition of theodicy, or the attempt to justify the goodness and justice of God in the face of evil and unmerited human suffering. Given Moby-Dick's grounding in the traditions of theodicy going back...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
2021
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| In: |
Christianity & literature
Year: 2021, Volume: 70, Issue: 4, Pages: 361-381 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history NBC Doctrine of God |
| Further subjects: | B
Theodicy
B Ahab B Ishmael B problem of evil B Moby-Dick |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This essay examines Moby-Dick as a mid-nineteenth-century fictional response to the Christian tradition of theodicy, or the attempt to justify the goodness and justice of God in the face of evil and unmerited human suffering. Given Moby-Dick's grounding in the traditions of theodicy going back to the book of Job, it is a potentially revealing exercise to compare Melville's novel to more recent examples of this form of discursive analysis, which have greatly proliferated over the last half-century. By examining a representative sample of early twenty-first century Christian theodicies by writers of varying denominational backgrounds, I seek to demonstrate that Moby-Dick dramatizes many of the same issues as discussed by these works, but by framing the issues in narrative and dramatic form, Melville's novel becomes significantly more compelling as an extended exhibition of the problem of evil than any discursive rationalization of its existence within the confines of Christian dogmatism. |
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| ISSN: | 2056-5666 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Christianity & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/chy.2021.0047 |