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Category - suffering

  • April 15, 2017
    A disturbing season: encountering the Divine in the music of Bach

    These are strange days for those of us whose spiritual lives are not focused on season and liturgy.

  • April 19, 2015
    Calling people cockroaches: limits of acceptable speech

    A recent BBC documentary powerfully depicted the plight of Christians in the Middle East, amidst threats by Isis and other forces.

  • April 5, 2015
    Jesus and the tomb-dweller: lifting death’s shadow

    Savi Hensman reflects upon Jesus' encounter with a deeply disturbed and isolated man and poses questions as to its meaning for the church and society of our own time.

  • October 20, 2014
    The little things: combining for change

    Ebola, war, terrorism, injustice, inequality, squalid government, torture. Sometimes the inventory of cruelty and suffering seems overwhelming. The temptation to spiral into despair and the cynicism born of helplessness can assail us all. But sometimes a glimmer comes in the darkness and smallness no longer seems to equal futility.

  • July 29, 2012
    Calf Cop and the still dews of quietness

    This morning I took part in Meeting for Worship in the small 18th century Friends Meeting House at Calf Cop in North Yorkshire. Situated in that area known to Quakers as '1652 country' where the borders of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria come within a few miles of each other, the Meeting House stands in a quiet burial ground bordered by pine trees and looks across an open landscape to the massive flat-topped mountain of Ingleborough.

  • April 14, 2011
    Where is God amid the suffering?

    In a reflection which is both global and deeply personal in its implications, Savi Hensman looks, in the light of recent painful personal experience, at the age-old question of God and suffering.

  • July 15, 2009
    Optimism, suffering and artful hope

    Genuine hope is quite different from optimism or wishful thinking, says Simon Barrow. To understand it we need fresh eyes attuned to the artfulness of reality and the presence of love even in the midst of suffering.

  • July 16, 2007
    Stuff happens but the Gospel moves us on

    Stuff happens in life - sometimes not very pleasant things, like being daignosed with cancer. Deirdre Good says the Gospel is about nurturing hopeful acceptance not blame in the face of both adversity and prejudice.

  • February 14, 2007
    Sentamu calls for action on Northern Uganda conflict

    Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu, who experienced first-hand the military dictatorship of Idi Amin, has called upon religious and political leaders – not least current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – to end to the “suffering and misery” of those impacted by the bloody conflict in Northern Uganda.

  • December 6, 2006
    Gaza has become a prison, say church and human rights groups

    Renewed violence in the Gaza Strip has exacerbated the humanitarian situation in a territory Palestinians call the "world's largest prison", say church and human rights organizations - writes Chris Herlinger for Ecumenical News International from Gaza City.