Why does a good and all-powerful God allow us to experience pain and suffering?
This difficult question has been dealt with in various palliative ways, but Stanley Hauerwas maintains in this critically acclaimed volume that the query itself is a theological error.
Drawing heavily on stories of ill and dying children to clarify his discussion of theological issues, Hauerwas explores why we so desperately seek explanations for suffering and evil in today's world, and he demonstrates why the solutions that have been suggested are doomed to failure. Modern medicine, he declares, has too often become a noisy way to hide the gaping silences created by the painful experience of childhood illness and death. Alternatively, he shows us a God who, through his believing community, "can give a voice to that pain in a manner that at least gives us a way to go on."
154 pages, Paperback