Devil's Ink, by Jeffrey C. Pugh, and The Devil Wears Nada, by Tripp York

Jeffrey C. Pugh and Tripp York are Facebook friends. Both teach religion at southern institutions of higher learning. Last year, each wrote a good-natured book about Satan. Pugh blurbed York's book ("As he piles up example after hilarious example of people searching for the wrong thing, he almost persuades me that Hell really is other people"), and York interviewed Pugh on his blog, The Amish Jihadist ("When it comes to writing authoritative books on Satan he is the daddy of us all"). If you like your theology mixed with a spoonful of sugar—or blackstrap molasses—either book will serve.

Devil's Ink, the more earnest of the two, would be more appropriately titled Digital Devil, since ink is no longer involved. If in some parallel universe C. S. Lewis's Uncle Screwtape is still penning letters to Wormwood, Satan himself now keeps a blog for his diabolical colleagues. Unlike Screwtape, who got intensely involved in one man's personal life, Satan now focuses on greater things. "There is still the small joy one gets when we see individual lives ruined through betrayal or abuse," he tells his minions, but "this is low-hanging fruit." Better to focus, for example, not on political sex scandals but on the underlying utilitarian attitudes which, "when connected with their economic lives, gives rise to big things like child prostitution and sex slavery."

In some 80 loosely connected blog posts, Satan's underlings can read about all sorts of "big things" that warm hell's braziers. The dark lord is happy when humans are narcissistically concerned with their own salvation; when their desire for purity creates "the conditions for countless slaughters"; when they define "the good life" in economic terms; when they either disrespect the material world or believe "that all meaning, all value, all worth" is found there; when they make politics their religion; when they conflate state and church; and when they torture one another in the name of preserving freedom. Satan really loves nation-states, which he calls "large-scale crime syndicates," and he adores war—just war, holy war, war for self-defense, war for empire, war by any name.