Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

by Miroslav Volf

How does the system work? Consider first what might be called the “background cacophony of evil.” It permeates institutions, communities, nations, whole epochs, and it is sustained, as Marjorie Suchocki puts it, by “a multiply nuanced and mirrored and repeated intentionality of purpose that exercises its corporate influence” (Suchocki 1995, 122). This is the low-intensity evil of the way “things work” or the way “things simply are,” the exclusionary vapors of institutional or communal cultures under which many suffer but for which no one is responsible and about which all complain but no one can target. This all-pervasive low-intensity evil rejuvenates itself by engendering belief in its own immortality and imposes itself by generating a sense of its own ineluctability.