Green Mountain Academy for Lifelong Learning (GMALL) welcomes Dr. Bill Freedman to talk about our understanding of evil. This first talk will focus on the early or pre-modern history of the concept of evil, which, in its ancient 2,000+ years, was almost always a theological issue. We’ll discuss the two basic kinds of evil, the natural and the moral, and we’ll examine and compare the definitions and treatments of evil in Judaism, in Christianity and more briefly in Islam, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. An obligatory feature of any discussion of evil in the pre-modern world is theodicy, the often-strained effort to explain and justify the existence of evil in a world created and governed by a presumably all-good, all-powerful God. Why did God allow it? Was He not all good, after all? Not sufficiently powerful to prevent or destroy it? Here we’ll look briefly at the theodicies of St. Augustine, Leibniz, who coined the term, the poets Milton and Pope and, drawing the pre-Modern into the early 19th century with Hegel. This is part one of a two-part series (September 30 and October 28). Registration is $18 per lecture or $30 for the two-part series. For more information, please call our office at 802-867-0111 or visit www.greenmtnacademy.org.