The defining premise of the Relational Free Will Defense is the claim that authentic love requires free will. Many scholars, including Gregory Boyd and Vincent Brümmer, champion this claim. Best-selling books, such as Rob Bell’s Love Wins, echo that love “cannot be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide.” The claim that love requires free will has even found expression in mainstream Hollywood films, including Frailty, Bruce Almighty, and The Adjustment Bureau. The analysis shows convincingly that the claim that authentic love requires free will, does not meet the criteria of consistency, compatibility with Scriptural sources, and the demands of concrete encounter with problems of moral evil.

Love and evil are real – they are substances of force fields which contain us as constituent parts. Of all the powers of life they are the two most pregnant with meaning, hence the most generative of what is specifically human. Love and evil stand in the closest relationship to each other: evil is both what destroys love and what forces more love out of us; it is, as Augustine astutely grasped, privative (requiring something to negate) but it is also born out of misdirected love. Breaking with naïve realist and post-modern dogmas about the nature of the real, this book provides the basis for a philosophy of generative action as it draws upon examples from philosophy, literature, religion and popular culture. While this book has a sympathetic ear for ancient and traditional narratives about the meaning of life, it offers a philosophy appropriate for our times and our crises. It is particularly directed at readers who are seeking for new ways to think about our world and self-making, and who are as dissatisfied with post-Nietzschean and post-Marxian 20th century social theory as they are by more traditional philosophical and naturalistic accounts of human being.

Must we be free to truly love? Evil is a problem for all Christians. When responding to objections that both evil and God can exist, many resort to a "free will defense," where God is not the creator of evil but of human freedom, by which evil is possible. This response is so pervasive that it is just as often assumed as it is defended. But is this answer biblically and philosophically defensible? In God Reforms Hearts, Thaddeus J. Williams offers a friendly challenge to the central claim of the free will defense—that love is possible only with true (or libertarian) free will. Williams argues that much thinking on free will fails to carve out the necessary distinction between an autonomous will and an unforced will. Scripture presents a God who desires relationship and places moral requirements on his often--rebellious creatures, but does absolute free will follow? Moreover, God's work of transforming the human heart is more thorough than libertarian freedom allows. With clarity, precision, and charity, Williams judges the merits and shortcomings of the relational free will defense while offering a philosophically and biblically robust alternative that draws from theologians of the past to point a way forward.

If God is all powerful and entirely good and loving, why is there so much evil in the world? Based on a close canonical reading of Scripture, this book offers a new approach to the challenge of reconciling the Christian confession of a loving God with the realities of suffering and evil. John Peckham offers a constructive proposal for a theodicy of love that upholds both the sovereignty of God and human freedom, showing that Scripture points toward a framework for thinking about God's love in relation to the world.

When first published, Evil and the God of Love instantly became recognized as a modern theological classic, widely viewed as the most important work on the problem of evil to appear in English for more than a generation. Including a foreword by Marilyn McCord Adams, this reissue also contains a new preface by the author.

Ali and her middle school classmates are raising flocks of fairies to make their wishes come true. But growing a flock is harder than it sounds: the fairies eat only human hair, and the rules for dealing with them are confusing, misleading, and subject to change. As Ali and her friends struggle to earn their wishes, mistakes are made, spells go awry, and soon Ali is up against hundreds of two-inch-tall imps who have very big plans—to replace all the parents in town!—and the power to carry them out. Comedy and fantasy intertwine in this lively tale of intrigue, magic, and the power of hair.

The acclaimed social psychologist and New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Loving discusses the nature of evil and humanity’s capacity for it. Originally published in 1964, The Heart of Man was influenced by turbulent times. Average Americans were suffering from different forms of evil, including a rise in juvenile delinquency. On a grander scale, the threat of nuclear war loomed over the nation, and President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. What could drive humanity to do things such as these? In The Heart of Man, renowned humanist philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm investigates man’s capacity to destroy, his narcissism, and his incestuous fixation. He expands upon ideas he presented in Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Art of Loving, and examines the essence of evil, as well as the choice between good and evil. He also explores man’s ability to destroy and further considers freedom, aggression, destructiveness, and violence. “The Heart of Man questions human nature itself, from the forms of violence that plague it to individual and social narcissism to how the positive value of “love of life” can potentially outweigh the destructive “syndrome of decay” caused by the love of death and other harmful tendencies of thought.” —Midwest Book Review