Several high-profile hate crimes have made headlines in 2009, confirming fears for some that bias attacks are on the rise. They include the April killing of three Pittsburgh policemen by a right-wing extremist and the shooting in June at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly white supremacist that left a security guard dead.

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security released a report detailing concerns about a rise in right-wing extremism. In The New York Times columnist Charles Blow parses the figures and uses a graphic to illustrate the dependence of right-wing hate groups on recruits with military training.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is an umbrella organization of more than 200 smaller organizations that works to promote human rights throughout the U.S. Wade Henderson is president and CEO, and Nancy Zirkin is the group’s policy director.

An analysis of the statistics by Human Rights First shows that while the number of hate crimes remained steady from 2006 to 2007, the number of attacks targeting Hispanics and LGBT people rose. The FBI reports showed a 3.3 percent rise in anti-Hispanic hate crimes and a 5.5 percent rise in the number of hate crimes motivated […]

The FBI’s has an index of all hate crime statistics since 1995.

Lisa Barnes Lampman is senior consultant at Dare Mighty Things and editor of God and the Victim: Theological Reflections on Evil, Victimization, Justice and Forgiveness. She formerly worked as vice president of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Written by Jarvis Streeter (University Press of America, 2008). Streeter compares Ernest Becker’s anthropological theories on the ideas of human nature, sin, and salvation with the ideas presented by traditional Christian theology.

Written by Marilyn McCord Adams (Cornell University Press, 2000). Adams writes on theodicy–how to reconcile the presence of evil with a belief in God’s goodness.

Written by Thomas Aquinas, edited by Brian Davies, translated by Richard Regan (Oxford University Press, USA, 2003). Aquinas addresses a broad range of philosophical questions related to the concept of evil.