Elizabeth Galbraith

Resistant Hope

Christian Living

“In Resistant Hope Elaine Siemsen successfully retools the theodicy debate along Irenaean lines, offering her reader an open universe in which evil and suffering are more inevitable than calamitous and in which Christ grounds not only our eschatological hope that good will ultimately overcome evil, but also our immediate hope that evil and suffering can, will, and should be resisted. Like Harold Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People she reframes the question, from "Why is this happening to me?" to "What now?" and in the process provides a pragmatic response to the problem of evil that avoids theologies of harm and stands firmly on the side of the sufferer. Her book will appeal to all who lament the damage that more traditional theodicies can do to innocent victims and who seek a Christian theodicy of practice.”