Early in his monograph, Greenway presents Charles Taylor's claim that the modern West's “greatest spiritual challenge” lies in maintaining a realism about the atrocities of evil and our moral complicity in them without surrendering to the nihilism that often results from condemnation of the world and ourselves (6–10). Greenway accepts Taylor's challenge and proceeds to offer a compelling neo-Levinasian, Dostoevskian, Christian-philosophical response.

Following Levinas, Greenway argues that our experience of being “seized by Faces”—that is, of passionate concern for others—discloses agape as the fundamental dimension of our ultimate reality. Attention to this reality exposes the falsity of the atomistic “I” that shapes the Enlightenment worldview and its nihilistic responses to evil. Whereas the challenge of evil has led many to doubt the fundamental goodness and meaningfulness of reality, Greenway argues that our experience of horror in the face of evil can also awaken us to the inherent, infinite worth of ourselves and those we encounter. He points readers to the character of Markel in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as the model of one whose experience of being seized by Faces facilitates an awakening to the agapic reality that enables people to encounter evil and their complicity in it without relinquishing the meaning and goodness of life.

A brief account of Greenway's proposal cannot do justice to its persuasiveness, for the thoughtful structure of his argument, illustrative examples, and patient consideration of counterarguments steadily sway readers to his point of view. For example, part 1 presents influential responses to the challenge of evil in the Western philosophical tradition, including rejections of God in the face of evil, Nietzsche's rejection of moral sensitivity, and the recent efforts of biocentrists who relativize particular occurrences of evil in view of the whole of creation. The convincing critiques Greenway raises to these influential positions neatly set up part 2, where he points readers to the agapic reality that surfaces throughout human experience, even amid abhorrent evils. In these dense chapters, Greenway shows how agape affords readers a path beyond the shortfalls of the Western philosophical responses to evil that he identifies in part 1. Greenway's use of concrete examples, especially memorable literary examples from Iris Murdoch and Dostoevsky in part 3, ushers readers into the agapic worldview that he champions.

The book's clarity of argument and prose, concise chapters, and engagement with foundational as well as cutting-edge perspectives on suffering make it an ideal book for advanced-undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Its genre is especially amenable to settings with religiously diverse students. Greenway identifies his project as a work of “philosophical spirituality” that utilizes general revelation to develop an argument within the “bounds of what is reasonable and good according to common public standards” (11). When he occasionally uses theological terms such as God, faith, grace, and salvation, he assigns them broad, nonconfessional definitions. This makes the book hospitable to readers who are new to or skeptical of Christian theology. It also makes the book's subtitle misleading, as Greenway does not engage the doctrines of grace or evil in a fashion that most theologians would anticipate.

Because Greenway's argument hinges on the phenomenological reality of being seized by Faces, it is vulnerable to objections concerning the universality of this experience or its equal availability to all. To this point, Greenway acknowledges how a person's self-absorption can inhibit his/her attention to Faces, and Greenway points to the Western preoccupation with the automonistic “I” as a social factor that contributes to this problem. Greenway does not address how other social norms such as racism and sexism affect the disproportionate impact that certain Faces have over others, however. He might have spoken to how white supremacy inhibits many people from being seized by the suffering of black bodies, or how misogyny similarly hinders the impact of suffering female bodies, such that certain people may not seize us as Faces like others do. This is a shortcoming in a book that otherwise methodically anticipates counterarguments and addresses the complexities of suffering with care. Still, because of Greenway's clear argumentation and concrete examples, he equips readers to extend his analysis to the realities of suffering that he does not address, as well as those that our world has yet to encounter.