Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Pain

Book Review: Suffering and the Search for Meaning by Richard Rice

Suffering and the Search for Meaning: Contemporary Responses to the Problem of Pain. Richard Rice (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014).
Suffering and the Search for Meaning: Contemporary Responses to the Problem of Pain. Richard Rice (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014).

Suffering and the Search for Meaning: Contemporary Responses to the Problem of Pain. Richard Rice (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014).

Summary: This book surveys seven different approaches to the question of why pain and suffering if there is a God. This serves both as an introduction to the subject of theodicy and provides pastoral and personal resources for responding to people in pain, including one’s own suffering.

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Listen: Suffering, Part 5

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Mark Eckel concludes his series on suffering. Visit Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, or the series introduction and Part 1. 

Quotation

“If you listen to the patient, he is telling you the diagnosis. A lot of people look at a specialist like me as a technician. They come to you for a procedure. And there is no doubt that procedures are important, or that the specialized technology we have these days is vital in caring for a patient. But I believe that this technology also has taken us away from the patient’s story. And once you remove yourself from the patient’s story, you no longer are truly a doctor.”[1]

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Chaos: Suffering, Part 4 (Scholar’s Compass)

fire photo
Photo by Muffet

Mark Eckel continues his series on suffering. Visit Part 3, Part 2, or the series introduction and Part 1 here. 

Quotations

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Desmond Tutu

“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything.” Albert Einstein

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Abraham Lincoln

“All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke

“Seek good and not evil . . . Hate evil, and love good.” Amos 5.14-15

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Displaced: Suffering, Part 3 (Scholar’s Compass)

barn swallow photo
Photo by Jose Sousa

Mark Eckel continues his series on suffering. Visit Part 2 here, or see the series introduction and Part 1 here. Mark has also written about the spiritual discipline of caring for a home here, a good complement to his poignant reflections on displacement in this post.

Quotation

Nearly 60 million people are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution — more than at any time since World War II. Half are children. In our current crisis, nearly 30 million children worldwide have been driven from their homes by war and persecution. Media coverage has lately focused on the Syrian dimension of this tragedy. But these 30 million girls and boys are from all over — Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, Libya, Nigeria, Honduras, El Salvador, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. [1]

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Hands: Suffering, Part 2 (Scholar’s Compass)

hands photoMark Eckel continues his series on suffering. See the series introduction and Part 1 here. 

Quotation

When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

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