Tag Archives: Suffering

Act in All Things as Love Will Prompt

My lectures on Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Shakespeare and Sophocles all seem to track back to Lent these days.

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Implore His Aid, in His Decisions Rest

The famous passage from Ecclesiastes–“All is vanity”–inspired a great poem by Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s final conclusion is that we can find happiness only in prayer.

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Crohn’s Disease and the Mariner’s Agony

A student with Crohn’s disease found a kindred soul in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

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Thee Thyself We Cannot Lose

In a powerful four-line poem, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge sums up the main lesson in the Book of Job: even when we suffer, we still have God.

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Children Wrestling with Faith & Doubt

Alice Munro’s “Age of Faith” is a powerful portrait of how children turn to God–and also why they turn away.

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Books Helped Free Angelou’s Caged Bird

Maya Angelou, who died Wednesday, found strength in the literature of Shakespeare, Poe, Dunbar, and others.

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Nature Red in Tooth & Claw? Maybe Not

Carleton’s Ian Barbour turned to Tennyson in seeking to find connections between science and religion.

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Making a Fetish of Suffering

Ivan Karamazov attacks those Christians who rationalize suffering by finding a higher purpose in it.

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Jane Austen and the Ethics of Care

Austen’s Emma demonstrates an ethics of care–but only for people in her own class.

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