Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-300) and index.

The cry of Rachel. Maritain's 1942 Marquette Aquinas lecture ; Maritain's The person and the common good ; Camus's The plague -- Joy. Being as the good and the eruption of willing ; Being and philosophical psychology ; An ordinary knowledge of God and metaphysics ; Metaphysics as implicit knowledge ; Being and the intellectual emotions -- Quandoque evils. Aquinas's rationale for the corruptible order ; The corruptible order and Quandoque evils ; Bracketing Quandoque evils between goods ; A caveat in understanding the subject of the consequent good ; The effect of human providence upon the frequency of Quandoque evils -- Natural corruptions. Death as a natural corruption ; Natural corruption as nondefinitive ; Ambiguity of "Praeter Intentionem" and "Per Accidens" ; God and the evil of punishment (Poena) ; Other interpretations ; Abraham and Isaac ; Conclusion -- Preliminaries to Aquinas and the contemporary discussion. C.G. III, 71: "If evil exists, God exists" ; William Rowe on cosmological reasoning ; De Ver. X, 12, ad 10m: "If not God from justice, then God from some other effect" ; Summary of Aquinas on the existence of evil ; A Strategy -- The Thomist and the contemporary discussion: personalist theodicies. Marilyn McCord Adams and "horrendous evils" ; William Hasker: personal satisfaction and world approval ; John Hick: creation as a gymnasium for the development of our virtues ; David Ray Griffin and the denial of genuine evils ; The Brothers Karamazov ; Thomistic "natural desires" of the human person -- The Thomist and the contemporary discussion: cosmological theodicies. Diogenes Allen and suffering as an experience of God ; David Hume and Dialogues concerning natural religion, X and XI ; William Rowe and "pointless evils" ; J.L. Mackie and further objections to a cosmological theodicy ; Mackie's fourth criticism and Aquinas on the causality of human choices ; Aquinas and Plantinga ; The avoidance of determinism ; The avoidance of divine culpability ; A Thomistic free will defense? ; Richard Swinburne: nature as a necessary display case for our knowledge of good and evil ; Bruce Reichenbach: developing Plantinga and Swinburne -- Conclusion and comparison to Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump. Brian Davies's apophatic treatment of the evil problem ; Eleonore Stump and the love of God -- The consolation of Rachel.