Touching Evil, Touching Good

This chapter looks at the teaching of special topics in the study of religion, in this case the representation of evil. Employing the medium of film to teach this topic enables students to reflect on “religious” assumptions and their implications for how we experience ourselves in the world. With the focus on a particular film, Crash, and the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, this chapter considers evil by analyzing the racism in Crash and its relationship to alienation, confession, and redemption. The more general project of a similar course would be to introduce students to evil as a complex dimension of human experience. Reading films critically increases the likelihood that students will move beyond either/or and black/white dichotomies toward a more integrated understanding of the problem of evil.