Martin Luther King Jr.'s God,Humanist Sensibilities,and Moral Evil

Abstract

This essay attends to the nature and meaning of moral evil through an interrogation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s personalism and African American humanism. Combining his modality of personalism with African American humanist sensibilities provides an opportunity to think about moral evil and theodicy in ways that do not collapse into redemptive suffering. This is done through a theological turn toward a doctrine of God that recognizes and appreciates God's ongoing and fundamental concern with human welfare, but a concern that often involves divine missteps and the need for God to redirect effort.