suffering

Some painters mesmerize me. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Mark Rothko, and Georges Rouault, for example. Their work glows, albeit in different ways. Yet it’s Rouault I continue to follow.

Why Rouault?

Elizabeth Gandolfo's first book is not just an anthropology. Its more daring and abidingly important gift is a statement about God.

Are the rest of us so different from our brothers and sisters in Libya or in Charleston? Are they heroes with whom we can never identify?

Todd Billings weaves his struggle with a rare form of blood cancer together with probing biblical and theological reflection.

Stanley Hauerwas’s book is about learning how to die and training how to be human. Broadly speaking, it is a book about time and purpose—or, better said, the purpose of time.

We know what stories do. The words bind us into a larger narrative. They give us an emotional and historical connection. They allow us to transfer important values. But they also allow us to build an intergenerational self.

There is no denying that in today’s world a culture of loneliness and isolation plagues individuals of every age, race and socioeconomic status. Although the church provides a sacred community that may help combat this loneliness, even the most devout believers have, at one time or another, questioned how or even if God is present in their suffering.

It takes a lifetime, as well as a remarkable life, to write a book like Eleonore Stump's Wandering in Darkness.

As pastors, we spend a great deal of time sharing in the
ongoing lives and adventures of our congregants and community members. We are
also called, literally, to come to love and suffer with them when
disappointments, disasters or deaths occur.

We Christians believe that we have a moral obligation to point to the pain that the rest of the world can’t see. Others may stroll past the suffering, but we stop and stare, take up an offering, make an appeal and collect blankets, sighing as we do our bit to alleviate some of the misery. That life may not actually be rotten in our part of the world today only increases our guilt for our occasional lapses into joy. How dare we sing when others are sufffering?

Psalm 51 does not let any of us off the hook—not the progressives, the evangelicals, or the feel-good agnostics.

Paul’s daunting promise to the Romans haunts me: “Suffering produces endurance,” he assures the Romans and us, “and endurance produces character and character produces hope.” Recently I stood in the pulpit of my church and looked over the top of a white, 32-inch-long casket at a young couple from my congregation. Their six-month-old son, who had been happy and healthy just days before, had died in his sleep. The unfathomable suffering of the family was shadowed by a church filled with mourners for whom the scene enacted their most dreaded fears.