This book is the twentieth in the series New Studies in Christian Ethics. It is very good to have another professional philosopher writing for the series and this is indeed a very unusual and challenging book. Several of the books in the series have combined philosophical and theological skills as this book does: notably, Kieran Cronin's Rights and Christian Ethics, Jean Porter's Moral Action and Christian Ethics, Garth Hallett's Priorities and Christian Ethics and Stephen R. L. Clark's Biology and Christian Ethics. All of these books closely reflect the two key aims of the series – namely to promote monographs in Christian ethics which engage centrally with the present secular moral debate at the highest possible intellectual level and, secondly, to encourage contributors to demonstrate that Christian ethics can make a distinctive contribution to this debate.

Gordon Graham's concern here is that evil should be taken seriously. He argues at length that secular accounts of evil are inadequate, either because they seek to explain away evil as some disorder or malfunction, or because they maintain that there is no such thing as absolute evil, or because they offer no hope beyond evil. In contrast, he presents a powerful case for thinking that a Christian narrative can provide a more adequate basis for understanding and overcoming evil and that to believe coherently in the existence of absolute evil requires us to believe in a providential God. Now, of course, such claims will immediately be greeted with much scepticism since it is widely assumed that the problem of evil presents theists with a unique and insurmountable problem.