Brian Cutter (University of Notre Dame) and Philip Swenson (The College of William & Mary) are the winners of the 2025 Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion.

The Marc Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion is a biennial essay competition open to scholars who are within fifteen (15) years of receiving a PhD or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program.

Cutter and Swensen won the prize for their co-authored essay, “The Omission Theodicy“.

Here’s the abstract of their paper:

Subsumption theodicies aim to subsume apparent cases of natural evil under the category of moral evil, claiming that apparently natural evils result from the actions or omissions of free creatures. Subsumption theodicies include Fall theodicies, according to which nature was corrupted by the sins of the first humans, demonic-action theodicies, according to which natural evils are caused by the actions of fallen angels, and simulation theodicies, according to which our universe is a computer simulation, with its apparent natural evils caused by the free actions of simulators in the next universe up. We propose a new subsumption theodicy: the omission theodicy. According to the omission theodicy, apparently natural evil, including pre-human animal suffering, results from the omissions of free creatures who had the ability to prevent it, but culpably failed to do so. We argue that the omission theodicy avoids the main problems with existing subsumption theodicies and deserves a respectable place among leading hypotheses about why God might allow the apparent natural evils we find in our world.

The prize is $5000 (to be split among the co-authors) and publication of the essay in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.

The prize is administered by Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers). You can learn more about it, including its past winners, here.