Introduction: Human Suffering

Abstract

The fact of suffering, whether in the catastrophic form that extends across entire communities—cruelly exemplified, as we write this Introduction, by the distressing famine that now threatens hundreds of thousands of people in conflict-riven Somalia—or the suffering that focuses on just one person as a result of individual illness or misfortune, is so closely bound to the character of human life, that it seems we cannot address the question of what it is to be human without also attending to the question of what it is to suffer, of how suffering is to be understood, and of what suffering calls for by way of response. Suffering ought thus to be a fundamental concern regardless of whether we are now suffering, regardless of whether we have suffered in the past, regardless of whether we will do so, or think we will do so, in the future.