ABSTRACT
To live in our time is to endure images and stories of horrifying suffering. Sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes catastrophic, sometimes unimaginable —our world almost deadens us with the suffering of humanity. It is no special virtue that leads scholars to reflect on such suffering: one can easily see that suffering demands responses, and that those who receive that demand as calling for interpretation, for understanding, for a search for meaning, will turn their minds to the pains endured by others. Underneath a vast range of academic inquiry today is a serious, if veiled, struggle to respond to the unprecedented suffering of the twentieth century. Much of medical science, of the social sciences, and of the humanities responds to human suffering, and indeed, often responds to the specific historical atrocities of our times. Who can study almost any facet of human culture and not sense the shadow of the widespread and organized violence of our recent past? We are scholars in order to resist suffering and violence and to respond for the suffering that has occurred and that threatens us still.
