Tag: civil dialogue

Of Casseroles and Community

Understanding why we might experience suffering was less important than knowing someone cared enough to show up with a casserole. This is always true, but I suspect that in this time of social-distancing when we are often deprived of human contact and communal meals it is especially true. We collectively decided that a theodicy of casseroles makes more sense than any theological explanation of evil and suffering ever could. A theodicy of casseroles is not about explanation at all; it is about presence and community.

Suvi Korhonen, Creative Commons

This fall semester I am teaching a course on theology and suffering. The course is titled “Sin, Suffering, and the Silence of God.” It is a course I teach every few years, so it was on the schedule for this fall long before Covid-19 swept across the world. The students in this class are amazing–they always are. It is a seminar for upper-level Religious Studies majors and it is cross-listed for Counseling students. The students who take it want to be there; the class gives them a space to ask questions they want to wrestle with.

This year, as we have begun the fall semester in a hybrid format, meeting in small groups, once a week only, masked, and socially distanced, a course on suffering takes on a different level of meaning. We began the semester acknowledging our individual and collective losses. We have, in only a few short weeks, lamented and grieved together.

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