ABSTRACT
Religions and spiritualities have long been centrally concerned with the experience of suffering. For Judaism, this experience – and the endeavour to 'make sense' of and endure it – has had great prominence. The failure of modern culture to prevent the Holocaust became one of the key concerns of the Critical School of Social Theory. The critical tradition of social work, like many philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, draws its roots from that school of thought, which originated in the 1930s in the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University, Germany. In Theodore Adorno's view, this violence was not only applied to others but to the very notion of the self. The West has long identified the human 'essence' with the mind, soul or other non-corporeal substance, and discounted, devalued and disciplined the body. Morality is fundamentally concerned with the just or fair treatment of others.
