| Cultural historian Andrew Delbanco explores how Americans have lost the sense of evil. His recent book The Death of Satan examines the literary, social, religious, and political life of three American centuries, focusing attention on how beliefs of good and evil were shaped by forces sometimes far removed from an explicit concern for ethics. Delbanco suggests that the consequences of our actions in modern life are less immediate than they once were and that it is growing increasingly difficult to feel an immediate human relation to an individual action or decision. He believes the reshaping of a definition of moral responsibility is a tall order, one that requires moving away from abstract, metaphorical terms toward more tangible, applicable, and personal ones. |
The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) |
