How are we to understand the atrocities that human beings visit upon each other? Are they to be seen as upwellings of Evil in the human spirit? Or have we moved beyond the need to understand human actions by appeal to "evil"? Once God became a problem and not a given for people, the nature and the existence of evil similarly became a problem. We will read closely works by Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Arendt, Camus, and other incisive observers of the human condition from the 19th and 20th centuries.