Green Mountain Academy for Lifelong Learning (GMALL) welcomes back Dr. Bill Freedman for part two of his talk about our understanding of evil. The first talk on evil, mainly historical and theological. focused on the concept as understood by Judaism and Christianity in the Biblical and Middle Ages. The second will be about evil as both phenomenon and idea in recent times and the present. We will discuss how evil has been redefined, largely in humanistic and secular terms, by contemporary historians, moral philosophers and thinkers. We will also discuss the perhaps paradoxical decline of the term’s use in modern discourse, even as what we might call evil in the world seems to have risen to previously unimaginable levels of cruelty, intensity and horror. We will also ask how seemingly ordinary people can be brought to perform such acts, how the virus of evil spreads from person to person, and how a phenomenon fed by the silence of bystanders may end in genocide. Could this virus, which spread through Europe so virulent in the ‘30s and ‘40s and elsewhere since take hold here? And now? Are there signs? Registration is $18 per person. For more information, please call our office at 802-867-0111 or visit www.greenmtnacademy.org.