Raschke, Carl2021-02-092021-02-0920212463-333Xhttps://hdl.handle.net/10092/101625http://dx.doi.org/10.26021/10678Whatever happened to “sin”? The concept itself, so integral and central to the Western theological tradition, has faded away over the most recent decades and centuries as even a topic for serious contention. While perduring and persistent among Christian conservatives, especially the expansive and highly diverse global population that has come to be labelled by sociologists of religion as “evangelicalism,” the term has gradually succumbed to a dearth of effective meaning and has been replaced by a variety of religiously neutral constructs, implying moral failure, psychological or behavior disorder, or political infamy. Even once trendy imaginaries as “collective sin”, a redeployment of the Augustinian notion of “original sin” (peccatum originalis) favored by Reformed thinkers, while lent a socio-political tweak by Reinhold Niebuhr , has given way to various critico-theoretical adaptations, including such capacious locutions as “patriarchy” or “systemic racism.” In many respects the notion of “sin” in the strict sense, rather than with attention to specific defects in either individual character or conduct, has gradually converged with the general concept of “injustice”, or plain old-fashioned “wrongness.”enThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Journal Article