(Image by TED)
(Image by TED)

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the TED conference, but if you don’t know anything about it I suggest checking out their website here. The yearly conference focuses on technology, entertainment, and design, and it defines its mission as “spreading ideas”. You can watch most of the conference talks on this website. There are some serious gems that you should watch. I suggest the following:

Also, I just watched the following presentation made by the Reverend Tom Honey. As the brief synopsis of the talk indicates, “It’s a classic problem in theology: How can the existence of evil be reconciled with a God who is supposed to be all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful? Many Christian thinkers have attempted answers to this question. In the days following the thousands of personal tragedies recorded during the South Asian tsunami of 2004, Tom Honey pondered those answers and found them wanting. Instead, he penned his own, personal, and sometimes dramatic response to the tsunami. This is a courageous talk for a Church of England vicar to have given. It concludes that certain traditional concepts of God just won’t do … and calls for believers and nonbelievers alike to dig deeper in their quest for truth.”

I was extremely impressed with his thoughts. None of them were particularly new to me, but this talk does provide a good theological redux of the issues involved in the current debate over the problem of evil. It’s an extremely personal and honest appraisal of thought, and I enjoyed listening to it.