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There is a story evidently true, about a conversation between the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr as they were returning from a joint lecture at Princeton University sometime in early 1941. The two brothers had gone quite separate ways on what was then referred to as "the interventionist issue" (in Europe), and the debate continued in the car. H. Richard bemoaned the way in which nations had come to deal with each other—by way of lying, cheating, coercion, hatred, fear, aggression and so on. As he talked Reinhold became more and more restless until at last he burst forth: "Yes, but Helmut, don't you know that's how nations have always treated each other!"

The article reviews different antitheodicies in response to Toby Betenson's article "Anti-Theodicy". Antitheodicies involve rejecting the position that God or meaning exist only, if evils have justifying morally sufficient reasons. The article builds on Betenson's division into moral and conceptual antitheodicies and his characterization of antitheodicies as a metacritique of the problem of evil. Moral antitheodicies are problematic, as they do not address the key conceptual issues and might end up in question-begging or moralism. Dissolving the problem of evil requires a conceptual antitheodicy that exposes its presuppositions as speculative metaphysics. Religious conceptual antitheodicies help to focus on different ways of sense-making that do not fall into theodicism.

The paper argues that Fridrikh Gorenshtein's preoccupation with evil and with the search for a proper response offers a useful lens through which to explore his conception of Jewishness and his identity as a Jewish writer working within the Russian literary tradition.

This paper examines Hegel's claim that philosophy "has no other object than God" as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. On this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegel's version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, Leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them – the "paradox of perspectivism".

Comparative philosophical studies can seek to fit some Eastern patterns of thought into the general philosophical framework, or, on the contrary, to improve understanding of Western ones through the view "from abroad". I try to hit both marks by means of establishing, firstly, the parallels between Indian versions of theodicy and the Hellenic and Christian ones, then by defining to which of five types of Western theodicy the Advaita-Vedānta and Nyāya versions belong and, thirdly, by considering the meaning of the fact that some varieties of Western theodicy, like the explanation of evil by free will and Divine dispensation aiming at the improvement of man, have Indian counterparts while others lack them. Some considerations concerning the remainders of primordial monotheisms ("an argument from theodicy") under the thick layers of other religious world-outlooks are also offered to the reader at the end of the article.