The more I read Ricoeur, the more I like him. I’m currently reading his collection of essays in Figuring the Sacred. In one particularly-powerful essay, he gives us two more reasons why we should not neglect reading Hegel and Barth: ‘With Hegel we try to think more, with Barth to think differently’. – Paul Ricoeur, ‘Evil: a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology’, in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I. Wallace; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 256.

And from the same essay, this provocative claim: ‘Suffering is only a scandal for the person who understands God to be the source of everything that is good in creation, including our indignation against evil, our courage to bear it, and our feeling of sympathy towards victims. In other words, we believe in God in spite of evil. To believe in God in spite of … is one of the ways in which we can integrate the speculative aporia into the work of mourning’. (p. 260)