Evaluates the social and spiritual ramifications of human suffering, drawing on classic spiritual texts while sharing the experiences of such individuals as tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka, an innocent death-row inmate, and the family of a September 11 victim.

It's right there in the Book of Job: "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward." Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition -- which leads to a question that has proved just as inescapable: Why? Why do we suffer? Why do people die young? Is there any point to our pain, physical or emotional? Do horrors like hurricanes have meaning? In Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, Scott Samuelson tackles that hardest question...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The inspirational classic from a renowned spiritual leader that "offers a moving and humane approach to understanding life’s windstorms” (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross).
When Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease that meant the boy would only live until his early teens, he was faced with one of life’s most difficult questions: Why, God?...

The quest for an answer to the problem of suffering is universal. People often treat Scripture like a manual, looking for a single clear response that explains the presence of evil and suffering. Brian Han Gregg thinks we should take a different approach. The Bible does not have one but many responses to suffering. To pick out one theme is to hear the sopranos but miss the choir. We need to listen to the whole biblical narrative to appreciate its...

"There is no cure for the human condition: life is hard. But Kieran Setiya believes philosophy can help. He offers us a map for navigating rough terrain, from personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world. In this profound and personal book, Setiya shows how the tools of philosophy can help us find our way. Drawing on ancient and modern philosophy as well as fiction, history, memoir, film, comedy, social science, and stories from Setiya's...

Offers ten strategies for acknowledging, healing, and moving past pain and trauma caused by layoffs, foreclosures, retirement losses, and health insurance problems.

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who...

A journal of private love notes written by a husband to his wife in the wake of a fatal car accident passes through the hands of a hospital patient and five other suffering people whose respective experiences connect them to each other in poignant and complex ways.

"When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes-war, famine, pandemic-we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its...