Sarah Ngu explores the work of Jimmy Linn, who brings a theological perspective to his work on cancer, seeing it as “hijacking the processes that give life and bending them towards destructive ends”:
This parasitic understanding of evil, as something that twists what is good but remains dependent on it, is not a scientific invention, but an old idea that can be traced to the fourth-century theologian Augustine. If Lin has a high view of cancer because he has a high view of our God-created bodies, it is not too much of a stretch to add that we ought to have a high view of sin that stems from our high view of the good. For those who bemoan the loss of morals with each successive generation, perhaps the task at hand, then, is not to make sin look darker, but to illuminate the background of good against which sin is preformed. All sin is a grasping for the good, and always points to the good things that make sin possible.
The Dish 