Tacit acceptance of the claim that one half of the world no longer contains antagonisms is supplemented by jests at everything that belies the official theodicy of the other half

all of which, translated into conventional theodicean language, signifies the coexistence in the same Universum of God, his total absence, and his complete opposite in Satan.

There is no obligation for The Road to answer an unanswerable question like theodicy.

It is like peering into the crucible of theodicy

the formal term for the attempt to reconcile the suffering and meaninglessness of life with the notion of a providential, benign and powerful deity. Theodicy is a project at times ingenious, bleak, necessary, magnificent and platitudinous.

If we can today read Hegel’s work as something other than a long ‘theodicy’ (as he himself put it, taking the term from Leibniz) – i.e. a demonstration that ‘evil’ in history is always particular and relative, whereas the positive end for which it prepares the ground is universal and absolute – do we not owe this to the way in which that work has been transformed by Marx?

the clickbait kind of truth, the kind that says ‘This One Weird Thing about the World Trade Center will Shock You’. It is also a kind of theodicy, an attempt to expose a ‘hidden truth’ that explains evil and suffering

Often enough, talk of disruption is a theodicy of hypercapitalism. Disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness.

It is like the Augustinian version of theodicy: novelists would far rather live in a universe in which negative reviews have the freedom to exist than in one from which such reviews had been banished.