Browsing by Subject "Suffering"

This dissertation traces the ethical and conceptual connections between Weil’s account of attention and Kollwitz’s artistic practice of attention, especially attention to suffering. Attention, in Weil’s view, is a strenuous surrender to things as they are, which involves the difficult work of letting those things be other than we desire (or even need) them to be. For both Weil and Kollwitz, attention is the only meaningful way of engaging human suffering, one’s own or that of others. My dissertation explores their ethically risky claim, and argues that attention is not only interesting or valuable but necessary when it comes to suffering: any genuine attempt to engage with suffering must begin with a discipline substantially similar to the one Weil writes about as attention and Kollwitz practices in her art. I show how Kollwitz visually extends Weil’s philosophy and theology of attention to suffering in two distinct ways: first, by attending in her art to her own suffering as well as the suffering of others; and second, by investing her art with a wholehearted and tactile focus on the human body.

For Weil, it is attention (as opposed to the will) that is at the heart of human agency. Meaningful action is, for her, impossible without attention. This means that actions intended to alleviate suffering cannot be effective unless they begin (and remain grounded) in attention. This is true especially because one of the effects of suffering (especially the extreme suffering Weil calls malheur, or affliction) is to disfigure the sufferer so much that she is no longer recognizable (even to herself) as a human being, and becomes invisible. Weil writes that attention, which is a form of love, is able to see sufferers even when suffering has made them invisible. Because attention is an exercise of the image of God in human beings, and is a participation in God’s work in the world, it can restore to those whom suffering has reduced to the status of objects a sense of their own human value and dignity. When it comes to our own suffering, the discipline of attention involves accepting it rather than attempting to evade it by passing it on to others. Weil argues that because of the way God entered into suffering in Christ’s incarnation and passion, the nature of suffering has changed: suffering is no longer empty, but is instead a place where we can meet God.

Kollwitz’s two first series of prints (A Weavers’ Revolt and Peasants’ War) show her drawing on many of the strands of modern art that surround her in pursuit of one central goal: to attend to human beings, and to help her viewers learn such attention through her work. The many states of her prints show the rigor of her revisions and the resonance between her artistic process and Weil’s account of attention. Over the course of her career, her aim of seeing humans accurately becomes more and more an aim to see those who suffer. On the one hand, Kollwitz turns toward the industrial poor among whom she lived, whose sufferings tended to make them invisible to others. On the other hand, she turns toward her own suffering, particularly her grief over the death of her son in WWI. In a late series of woodcuts called War, and in her bronze sculpture Mother with Dead Son, she connects the two. Both the print series and the sculpture serve as an invitation to hesitate in a way that lets us attend to the crushing and disorienting reality of suffering. I argue that the series War shows humans meeting their own exposure to the possibility of affliction, and that Kollwitz’s self-described calling “to voice the sufferings of people” fits into a theological account of lament, which presents human suffering in the context of God’s hearing and care.

My dissertation contributes to theological aesthetics by proposing attention as a generally commendable practice of perception, and by offering Weil and Kollwitz’s way of engaging with suffering as an alternative to theodicy.

This study takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the relationship

between sport and spiritual formation. By inviting to the conversation contributions

from sociological research, personal narratives, biblical themes and philosophical

arguments, it aims to examine how voluntary suffering in sport could provide a context

conducive to spiritual growth. Rather than look at physical engagement in sport and

spiritual formation as unrelated domains of pursuit, we will map the contours where the

two converge and even stimulate one another. We will analyze courage as a unique

quality fit for cultivation in suffering, and positions it as an integral part of living out

faith, hope and love. This study seeks to address the rigidity that is prevalent in the way

Christians think of spirituality and deepen the conversation as it relates to formative

frameworks in athletics.

What is the relationship between evil and suffering? What is it about being human that causes us to experience suffering in the ways and to the extents that we do? What is suffering? These are questions of fundamental human importance, but surprisingly little of the vast literature on suffering deals with them directly and at length. The present work fills this gap by providing a multifaceted response from a Thomistic perspective. I show how human sufferings occur within a vast web of relationality. In the process, I also undertake a fundamental recovery of the interpersonal orientation of the human creature in Aquinas’s thought.

The framework that I develop for understanding suffering addresses the cognitive, volitional, and bodily components of our nature as deeply relational human persons who are made in the image of God. I argue that suffering is significantly constituted by the deprivation of relational goods in the natural and supernatural orders, and contextualized by other such goods. We long to know, love, and be in communion with beings outside of ourselves: especially with other personal beings, in shared enjoyment of truth and goodness; and, to a lesser extent, with the natural goodness of non-personal creation. This interior orientation points us toward the good things out there that make for our flourishing. And evils, broadly understood, are lamentable lacks and corruptions of the good things out there or of the bodily and internal goods that enable us properly to interact with and assess reality. The present work investigates the deep contextualization of suffering within our life histories and expectations, our understandings and our relational cares.

Part I frames the account of suffering by considering at length what makes for human flourishing. I make explicit the relational emphasis that is latent in Aquinas’s depiction of human nature. Part II addresses the metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology of evil and its implications for how we should understand suffering. Finally, Part III constructs a synthetic account of suffering that brings together considerations of relational flourishing, evil, and human affectivity. I end by examining what I call suffering’s tripartite encounter with evil, the role of awareness in suffering, and the notion of finding meaning in suffering. I argue, inter alia, that this Thomistic characterization of suffering supports a tripartite understanding of suffering vis-à-vis evil: There is the evil that causes suffering, the negative affect that results, and the sufferer’s often-painful awareness of these first two. I also argue that the idea of finding meaning in suffering might helpfully be understood as the possibility of new creation ex nihilitate mali—out of the nothingness of evil.

In building this account, I show why Aquinas is an underappreciated resource for understanding the dynamics of human suffering. In particular, his metaphysics of evil, combined with his relationally oriented anthropology, allows for an incisive diagnostic account of suffering. The present work also makes several interpretive and synthetic contributions to the Aquinas scholarship. My aim throughout is to develop an account that is illuminating for any theorist who seeks to better understand the deceptively complex and ever-pressing issue of human suffering.

In the opening scene of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, the marquis Walter is confronted by his subjects who beg him with “meeke preyere” and “pitous chere” to marry and produce an heir. In this moment, they seek from Walter something he is reluctant to give. Walter, an avid hunter and a confirmed bachelor, exclaims, “Ye wol...myn owene peple deere, / To that I nevere erst thoughte streyne me.” Despite his lack of desire to constrain himself in marriage, however, Chaucer writes that the meek prayers and piteous appearance of Walter’s people “made the markys herte han pitee.” He subsequently vows to marry. The force of “made” is important here for it suggests that pity acts in such a way that it compels the pitier to act counter to his or her desires. In the moment of experiencing pity, traditional power structures such as those of social status temporarily reverse. Walter, who typically wields power over his people, comes under their power as his pity transforms his desires and overcomes his will.

My dissertation, In Search of Pity: Chaucerian Poetics and the Suffering of Others, considers the development and transformation of the language of pity in medieval English literature and culture through a study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. I argue that Chaucer reformulated trans-European pity discourses for an English audience, and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. The fin’amor tradition, Passion meditations, hagiographies, political treatises about common profit, all were concerned with the ways in which pity was formed and the effects it had on those who felt it, and Chaucer drew on these traditions to craft his poetry. Chaucer was one of the earliest English vernacular poets to make extensive use of the language of pity. He refers to it more than 200 times throughout his poetry and does so in a wide variety of contexts. Pity is the primary virtue of Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde; it is one of Chaucer’s keywords for describing the sorrowful lives and deaths of female martyrs in the Legend of Good Women, and it is Walter’s response to his people in the Clerk’s Tale. In Search of Pity traces how Chaucer’s fascination with pity developed out of larger medieval conversations about the ethical and affective work of responding to the suffering of others.

In my project, I show how individual discourses offered distinctive accounts of the formation and effects of pity. A pitying woman in fin’amor might come to love her male lover as in the Roman de la Rose; a pitying ruler might offer a pardon for offenses, such as in Richard Maidstone’s Concordia. The common thread in medieval treatments of pity, however, was an understanding that it contained the possibility for suspending or obliterating traditional power structures that schematized gender and social status. This capacity is foreign to our contemporary conception of pity. Today, pity frequently suggests a contempt for its object. This association is so culturally embedded that in “Compassion: the Basic Social Emotion” Martha Nussbaum spends most of her essay discussing the historical emotion of pity, but she changes her vocabulary when writing about the contemporary. She notes that pity “...has acquired nuances of condescension and superiority to the sufferer that it did not have formerly,” and thus she “...shall switch over to the currently more appropriate term ‘compassion’ when...talking about contemporary issues.” Medieval pity with its challenge to the social order is a lost concept. In my research, I am thus interested both in rediscovering the nature of that concept and in charting the ways power was represented in early accounts of pity. Through an examination of the function of power in medieval pity, I contend that we can better understand how pity has come to suggest superiority or disdain for its object.

Chaucer is central to rediscovering the forgotten concepts attached to pity. He wrote more about pity than perhaps any other fourteenth-century English author, and the scope of his influence on English literary representations of pity can be seen in Robert Henryson, John Lydgate, and William Shakespeare. I show how Chaucer’s incorporating distinct treatments of pity from fin’amor, Passion meditation, hagiography, and political treatises brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity’s work in challenging power structures. In doing so, I argue that Chaucer is also one of the first authors to explore the limitations and dangers of pity. In my dissertation, I show that this exploration culminates with the Legend of Good Women and the Parson’s Tale in a disavowal of any pity that is not explicitly linked to acts of charity. This disavowal is unusual. Pity in works such as Maidstone’s Concordia or even the Roman de la Rose is enthusiastically embraced. But by reading Chaucer’s poetry alongside Christine de Pizan’s critique of the Roman de la Rose and Julian of Norwich’s revision of affective meditation on the Passion, I argue that Chaucer is participating in a developing critique of pity taking shape across Europe. The difference between Chaucer and Christine de Pizan or Julian of Norwich, however, is that his critique addresses pity not within one medieval discourse such as fin’amor or Passion meditation, but across many. In critiquing pity across discourses, I argue that Chaucer develops the pity discourse in England and reformulates it to include a new examination of its limited social power.

Respect for autonomy is the foundation of modern bioethics, even (or especially) where bioethics is attentive to the problem of suffering caused by the practice of medicine itself. It provides guidance in the midst of therapeutic and moral uncertainty, justification for morally problematic enterprises, and the promise of protection against self-serving or predatory medical personnel. Yet bioethical arguments that appeal to the injustice or the horror of suffering depend on an instinctual and uncomplicated association of suffering, especially imposed suffering, with evil. This uncomplicated association, this flattening of the complexities of the moral landscape, must lead to a diminished capacity to navigate the very difficulties that define the field of bioethics. This dissertation explores the relationship, particularly, of autonomy, suffering, and happiness in modern bioethics, as represented by three key theorists (James Childress, Tom Beauchamp, and H. Tristram Engelhardt). It then contrasts these findings with resources from the Christian tradition: Luke-Acts, the letters of Paul, and the theologians Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Genoa, and Margaret Ebner. Their accounts of the meaning and experience of suffering within well-lived lives makes for a more robust account of the moral life, one in which suffering plays a formative part.

My subject is the redemption of profound suffering. I begin with the presumption that there is no suffering beyond the redemptive reach of God's grace. Drawing on insights from a number of academic disciplines, as well as on a wide variety of literary accounts of profound suffering, I consider the impact of the suffering of interpersonal violence on the formation of individual identity. I frame identity-formation in temporal terms, considering the impact of suffering in each temporal dimension: past, present, and future. In considering the past, I focus on the nature of memory, and argue that the memory of suffering resides in the body, soul, and mind, continually shaping the individual, and that a theological account of memory, therefore, cannot be reduced to cognitive recall. I also suggest that the integrity of the memory of suffering is often a casualty of suffering. In considering the present, I turn to an account of community which I argue is, likewise, an integral element of individual identity. I show the ways in which suffering, and the memory of suffering, continues to isolate those who have suffered. Next, I consider the future, and suggest that the anticipation of the future shapes both the memory of the past and the experience of the present. The memory of past suffering, I argue, threatens to obliterate the future in a way that can be devastating to present identity. I suggest that all three temporal dimensions are not only integral to identity but also embedded within one another. And I argue that, in light of the formative nature of suffering, the redemption of the individual necessarily includes the redemption of each temporal dimension. I suggest that there are specific ecclesial practices which develop habits of right vision, making this redemption evident such that the profound suffering of the past can be re-membered as a witness to God's redemption.

At times, scripture shocks and puzzles. How might Christians understand scripture’s aporia and its embeddedness in modes of domination? Confessional accounts often seek to reduce textual problems to misreading. Conversely, approaches that center oppression tend to find the text incorrigibly repressive. Few approaches imagine the text as both problematic and generative. This dissertation steers both the postliberal recovery of figural reading and the liberationist attention to context alike away from excessively theoretical construals of how reading ought to work, and toward biographical accounts of the skills, virtues, and pitfalls that attend struggles to read scripture well amid profound moral difficulties. Attending to three case studies of individuals reading the Bible under conditions of suffering and loss I ask: when Christians are wounded in their reading, how can scripture also form them well? In what follows I provide an account of the wounds of scripture and its readers. These include the wounds within scripture (painful passages, passages that contradict others) and the wounds that Christians inflict on others through destructive readings. Applying the language of wounds (with its full Christological connotation) to scripture permits Christians to take seriously the difficulty of the Bible alongside its endless capacity, by the Spirit, to heal and transform. I argue that scripture’s capacity to form well amid these wounds is a matter not so much of hermeneutical procedure but of embodied response. Thus, while my first chapter lays out a conceptual account of wounds in scripture and its readers, the succeeding chapters display three practical case studies of individual readers. I attend to apocalypticism through the life of Anna Jansz, a sixteenth-century Anabaptist martyr; the complex relationship between slavery and the Bible in the autobiography of the nineteenth-century emancipated preacher John Jea; and the pain of scriptural accounts of election in the writings of the contemporary Palestinian Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour. In all three cases the Spirit’s grace, manifest in biography and historical circumstance, tends to these wounds, bringing life out of death on the pattern of the wounds of Christ. This dissertation contributes to the field of scripture and ethics. Through attending to the enduring difficulty and redemptive possibility of scripture in the lives of particular readers, I hope to demonstrate that scripture’s difficulties cannot be resolved simply by hermeneutical procedure. Instead, reading scripture well requires the embodied response of a life.

This thesis project focuses on preaching a robust theology of the cross. This work was born out of a desire to envision and enable preaching shaped by a theology of the cross that acknowledges historic theologies of the atonement, while also being informed by contemporary voices that have served to broaden the church’s understanding of God’s saving act through the cross of Jesus Christ.

A robust theology of the cross seeks to identify those aspects of atonement theologies that have been co-opted by oppressive power structures, recognizing the deeply problematic ways that theologies of the cross have supported the oppression of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. This project seeks to bring voices into the conversation that have often been marginalized in hopes of a more inclusive and faithful theology of the cross.

The methodology for this thesis reflects research through the exploration of a variety of available literary resources, engaging theologians representative of differing historic and contemporary views on the cross. In addition to surveying traditional atonement theories that have been fundamental to the church’s understanding historically, the contributions of black, liberation and feminist theologians have been engaged to develop a deeper understanding and more robust theology of the cross.

After engaging with a variety of theologians in search of a more comprehensive theology of the cross, this thesis explores the implications of a robust cruciform theology for contemporary preaching. In the final chapter I offer some examples of my own pulpit ministry that have been informed by this project.

Through engaging traditional and contemporary theologians, I have come to appreciate more fully the overlapping of theological motifs and images of the cross that are provided through the biblical narratives. This work has left me with a clear understanding that to claim one particular atonement theory to the exclusion of all others hampers any hope of developing a rich and robust theology of the cross.

The theological perspectives encountered in this work have had an impact on my life and ministry. The Christus Victor views of Gustaf Aulen have greatly expanded my understanding of Christ’s conquering work over against the principalities and powers, while the work of Charles Campbell has greatly impacted my understanding of preaching’s role in leading congregations toward a posture of resistance against the powers.

Black, liberation and feminist theologians have offered valuable critiques of traditional atonement theories, theories that have often been mishandled by the powerful, becoming tools of oppression against the weak and vulnerable. I believe my use of theological language is more faithful and sensitive thanks to their witness.

I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of the role solidarity plays in a faithful Christian witness. This work has revealed to me more fully that cross-bearing discipleship requires standing in solidarity with those who suffer unjustly, while joining in the struggle against all forms of injustice. I realize now that to stand in solidarity with the One whose death on the cross is the supreme act of solidarity with human suffering is to stand in solidarity with those who suffer, especially the weakest and most vulnerable.

I now see more clearly that the cross provides a way of seeing. To see my neighbors through the lens of the cross is to see their suffering, to see the results of injustice and to see my own complicity with systemic and institutional barriers to life-giving wholeness and freedom for all people.

This project was born out of a desire to engage in a pulpit ministry that enables and empowers a cruciform congregational character. Through this thesis project, I have come to believe more strongly than ever that faithful cross-shaped preaching is essential to casting a vision that supports a way of seeing and knowing that can open the hearts and minds of thoughtful Christian disciples, stirring imaginations to consider what it means to take up one’s cross and follow Jesus.

This thesis project focuses on preaching a robust theology of the cross. This work was born out of a desire to envision and enable preaching shaped by a theology of the cross that acknowledges historic theologies of the atonement, while also being informed by contemporary voices that have served to broaden the church’s understanding of God’s saving act through the cross of Jesus Christ.

A robust theology of the cross seeks to identify those aspects of atonement theologies that have been co-opted by oppressive power structures, recognizing the deeply problematic ways that theologies of the cross have supported the oppression of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. This project seeks to bring voices into the conversation that have often been marginalized in hopes of a more inclusive and faithful theology of the cross.

The methodology for this thesis reflects research through the exploration of a variety of available literary resources, engaging theologians representative of differing historic and contemporary views on the cross. In addition to surveying traditional atonement theories that have been fundamental to the church’s understanding historically, the contributions of black, liberation and feminist theologians have been engaged to develop a deeper understanding and more robust theology of the cross.

After engaging with a variety of theologians in search of a more comprehensive theology of the cross, this thesis explores the implications of a robust cruciform theology for contemporary preaching. In the final chapter I offer some examples of my own pulpit ministry that have been informed by this project.

Through engaging traditional and contemporary theologians, I have come to appreciate more fully the overlapping of theological motifs and images of the cross that are provided through the biblical narratives. This work has left me with a clear understanding that to claim one particular atonement theory to the exclusion of all others hampers any hope of developing a rich and robust theology of the cross.

The theological perspectives encountered in this work have had an impact on my life and ministry. The Christus Victor views of Gustaf Aulen have greatly expanded my understanding of Christ’s conquering work over against the principalities and powers, while the work of Charles Campbell has greatly impacted my understanding of preaching’s role in leading congregations toward a posture of resistance against the powers.

Black, liberation and feminist theologians have offered valuable critiques of traditional atonement theories, theories that have often been mishandled by the powerful, becoming tools of oppression against the weak and vulnerable. I believe my use of theological language is more faithful and sensitive thanks to their witness.

I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of the role solidarity plays in a faithful Christian witness. This work has revealed to me more fully that cross-bearing discipleship requires standing in solidarity with those who suffer unjustly, while joining in the struggle against all forms of injustice. I realize now that to stand in solidarity with the One whose death on the cross is the supreme act of solidarity with human suffering is to stand in solidarity with those who suffer, especially the weakest and most vulnerable.

I now see more clearly that the cross provides a way of seeing. To see my neighbors through the lens of the cross is to see their suffering, to see the results of injustice and to see my own complicity with systemic and institutional barriers to life-giving wholeness and freedom for all people.

This project was born out of a desire to engage in a pulpit ministry that enables and empowers a cruciform congregational character. Through this thesis project, I have come to believe more strongly than ever that faithful cross-shaped preaching is essential to casting a vision that supports a way of seeing and knowing that can open the hearts and minds of thoughtful Christian disciples, stirring imaginations to consider what it means to take up one’s cross and follow Jesus.

This dissertation addresses a long-standing but rarely discussed problem in Pauline studies: given Paul’s understanding of how God has acted in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to overcome death, how do we explain the ongoing existence of death? Through an examination of the Pauline letters, particularly Romans, this dissertation offers two interrelated explanations, one causal and the other teleological or purposive. From the causal perspective, it is argued that sin in the form of the sinful passions remains connected to the body even of Christians, which allows sin to exercise an ongoing corrupting influence on the body. From the teleological or purposive angle, it is contended that God uses the mortal condition to deepen the divine-human and intrahuman relationships.