Alan Jacobs, in his new book Original Sin, lists "five distinct beliefs" which make up an Augustinian anthropology (or a belief in original sin): You must believe that everyone behaves in ways that we usually describe as selfish, cruel, arrogant, and so on. You must believe that we are hard-wired to behave in those ways and do not do so simply because of the bad examples of others. You must believe that such behavior is properly called wrong or sinful, whether it's evolutionarily adaptive or...

"Original Sin: A Cultural History" (Alan Jacobs) I just finished Original Sin, an excellent book by Wheaton English professor Alan Jacobs (heretofore of Books and Culture and First Things fame). It's obviously appropriate to argue for the doctrine of original sin via direct scriptural exegesis. But Jacobs' book, though it does a (helpful!) bit of that, builds up a supplementary, inductive case. He tells many stories that demonstrate the truth of the doctrine. Many of those stories involve...