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Author and lecturer Os Guinness has written or edited more than 20 books, including The Dust of Death, The Call, and Invitation to the Classics. Earlier this month, HarperSanFrancisco published Guinness's latest work, Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.

Why did you write this book, and why now?

I actually had the date September 11 marked down in my calendar for a dinner discussion in Manhattan on evil, which was suddenly made all the more urgent by the terror strike, and I found myself in a passionate discussion of evil among leaders in New York and Washington.

Far earlier than that, evil has somehow been the horizon of my life ever since I was born in China in World War II. Twenty million were killed during the Japanese invasion that swirled around us, and five million-including my own two brothers-died in a terrible famine in Henan province, in three nightmarish months. My parents and I nearly died, too. Later, I witnessed the climax of the Chinese revolution and the beginning of Mao's repression.

So my own life challenged me to think about the problem of evil at a very early age. This left me wanting to address what I have never seen elsewhere: a book that tackled both the personal and the public issues together: Why do bad things happen to good people? And what does it say of us, after the most murderous century in human history, that the people who did these things are the same species we are?

Talk of evil is in the air, from the President's listing of the "axis of evil," to the televised beheadings by the Muslim terrorists and the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and now the tsunami disaster. Several new books, including yours, are grappling with the topic. Yet you say in the book that we are illiterate when it comes to evil. How so?

Sadly, the terrorist strike found the United States as unprepared intellectually and morally as it was militarily. This is the country with the most radical and realistic view of evil at its core-expressed in the notion of the separation of powers in the Constitution because of human nature and the abuse of power. But various philosophies and ideas have undermined that view over the last 200 years, so that American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clich

You've said that the average churchgoer does not understand the hearts of wealthy Christians who wield a disproportionate amount of influence or power in society. Can you expand on that?

Let's face it-a guy who makes seven or eight figures lives in a different world. We may not like it, but there's truth to it. And what does the wealthy person hear from the pulpit? Rarely do they hear anything that speaks to the pressures, seductions, decisions, and choices they have to make.

So we asked the question, Could we produce anything that had devotional value and spoke particularly to that group of people? I spent time combing the Scriptures, and came up with nearly 290 passages I felt held relevance to the person of means and influence.

After doing that study, is your thinking different than it was in your pastoral ministry days?

Yes. My thinking about stewardship has radically changed over the last 10 or 15 years, particularly since I became more involved with the Leadership Network. I began spending time with people I didn't normally mix with-people of means and influence. I heard stories and observed a lifestyle I was not brought up with.

My generation grew up when money was essentially considered evil. At times the stock market was likened to gambling, and wealthy people were few and far between. When people talked about a theology of money, they meant tithing-that's all. So for most of us, the notion of dealing with people who had surplus amounts of money, who were going to make strategic decisions about how to give that money away, was just unheard of.

Now we have a whole new class of boomer-age evangelicals and younger individuals who have been able to buy their way into special ministries. They go to conferences at five-star resorts where they hire the best speakers and musicians. As long as they're willing to pay the large entry fee, they can spend three days with those who some consider superstars such as Bill Hybels, Max Lucado, or Chuck Colson. They're becoming an elite Christian gated community. And that's concerned me.

Do you think the pendulum has swung too far?

Yes. We now have this privileged few in evangelicalism who-and I'm generalizing here-are not doing much "church" anymore. They can do 10 or 12 of these conferences a year and just blow into church every once in a while. They also move from home to home in different parts of the country and even the world, so their loyalty to the local congregation drops.

Besides, the local congregation really doesn't have much to offer them. If they're around for too long, people approach them asking for money. And they may have to do jobs that are frankly beneath their giftedness and sense of calling. So a smaller church really doesn't offer much to these people.

Have you ever heard persons of wealth say, "People don't have any idea how hard it is to give away money"?

Many times. The more they give, the more financial security becomes a problem. They may have a spouse who does not share their philanthropic interest. Or they've heard war stories from friends who gave unwisely to an organization and ruined it with their generosity. Many organizations don't know what to do with major gifts and end up abusing them.

I think a major deterrent for wealthy people is they no longer know who their friends are. A wealthy woman in our congregation gets phone calls every day from people who want to take her out for dinner. She doesn't know whether they want to be with her because they like her as a Christian woman, or because they want her cash. Ten years ago, I asked her to serve on our salaried pastoral staff. We trained her, and she became a first-class staff member and gave me about nine or ten years of fabulous pastoral ministry to women.

Wealthy people get so tired. I can tell you about one family in this country that's descended into terrible cynicism over the last few years because they have seen the money they gave wasted. They have seen such abuse that they are sick of appeals. And they put all kinds of firewalls between themselves and the money they give because they don't want to hear from one more person like that. I think it curls the soul.

Do people of wealth tend to give more to other ministries they're involved with-schools, for example-than they do to their local congregation?

Yes, they do. The family of a close friend of mine at Grace Chapel paid a large part of the expense to build one of the major buildings at Gordon College in Massachusetts. I took him out to lunch one day and asked him whether he'd make a major grant to Grace Chapel for a project we had in mind. He said, "Well, I'll think about it. But, Gordon, a long time ago the family decided we would not give large chunks of money to our church-ever."

I've heard several times that churches rarely receive major philanthropic gifts. The boomer generation usually gives money to projects that have a conclusion, whereas my generation was willing to put money in the general fund and say use it as you will.

Now that boomers are starting to retire and pass their money on to their kids, do you see any differences in attitude or philosophy from the World War II generation?

Until recently, few people passed on large sums of money to a younger generation. So it's difficult to say. But now we know that, strange as it seems, in most cases the money ruins the next generation.

There are some wonderful exceptions, but passing large amounts of money on to your children is one of the most dangerous things you can do, if you don't put some very stringent controls on how that money is to be used after you're gone. There's no doubt money can cripple the soul and mind.

The burden of wealth is almost incomprehensible to someone who's never had much of it. I'm probably going to be able to live comfortably through my retirement years if everything goes well. But I'm not a wealthy man by any means-I can't comprehend that people who have $50 million in their bank accounts find their money to be a burden. But sadly, they do.

For a century, foundations have been sources of private wealth for public purposes; they have committed great resources to address society's ills but they have remained wary of straying too close to the political sphere. Foundations are prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity and from lobbying elected officials about legislation. So foundations have often viewed their funding as a counterweight to public spending, supporting, for example, domestic social services or international public health initiatives.

Yet a notable portion of foundation spending a growing portion for some foundations is targeted almost directly at the political process. This spending is intended to win the "war of ideas" under way in American politics. It supports research and advocacy that aims to influence how elected officials and the public think about a broad range of policies. This "war of ideas" is fundamentally a battle between liberals and conservatives, progressives and libertarians, over the appropriate role for government. Some progressive writers argue that conservatives have been winning battles in the war of ideas because liberal foundations are not spending near the amount that conservative foundations are on the war and the liberal money is not deployed nearly as effectively.

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