Where Is God When We Suffer?

There are questions asked from a distance and questions asked from close up. This book is written for the second kind.

Twenty centuries of theodicy have tried to justify God in the face of suffering. Where Is God When We Suffer? examines them one by one — retribution, privation, soul-making, the best of all possible worlds, free will, the greater good, the compensation of heaven — and concludes that each holds some truth and none bears the weight we ask of it.

Then it does something the shelf rarely does: it refuses the project altogether. Not because the arguments are weak, but because explaining a person’s suffering to them is a way of consenting to it. The book calls this the refusal of theodicy, and argues it from Scripture — from Job, whose friends are the theodicists and who is the one God vindicates; from Luke 13 and John 9, where Jesus twice declines to read a calamity as a verdict.

What is left when the explanations go is not silence. It is a place. The book moves from the why to the who, and finds God where no one would think to look for him: not above the wound, not after it, but in it. The risen body is glorious and it keeps the scars. God could have erased them. He did not.

Eighty-one short chapters, four appendices, and a glossary of the terms the argument needs. Written for readers who have been told too often what their suffering was for — and for the ones sitting beside them, who have run out of things to say.