Plague is an apt metaphor to describe much of the gratuitous evil in our world. Alan Mermann sets out to study the various ways by which we respond to the appearance of plague in our communities. Using plague both as reality and as metaphor, he looks at the role of faith in guiding and sustaining us toward ethical responses. He documents and discusses the responses that we make by using a variety of literary sources. Real plague, like the bubonic plague, and metaphorical ones like race, industrialization, ecosystem destruction, etc., are discussed in the context of poetry, novels, scientific writing, and autobiography.