In today’s episode, two philosophers explore this question: How should we understand suffering? Is it simply the opposite of human flourishing, or is there a deeper meaning? And what does suffering mean for belief in a good God?
You’ll hear from Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher at Notre Dame, and John Stuhr, a philosopher at Emory University. Drawing on both personal experience and philosophical commitments, they reflect on how Christian and naturalistic worldviews make sense of suffering in human life.
This forum was held at Emory in April 2025. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
In the Christian tradition, God himself chose to live an embodied, incarnate human life with all the physical pain that comes with being human— to be the victim of state violence and to be the victim of hatred— the kinds of things that cause some of the most serious forms of suffering in our social lives. So there's some aspect of God that deeply empathizes with the worst forms of suffering that we experience but has also somehow redeemed them.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — the three big Abrahamic religions that believe in a single morally perfect omnipotent God — all talk a lot about suffering. Suffering is not a surprise to those traditions or their scriptures.
For some people, suffering is a humongous obstacle to their religious faith. But, for me, at least temporarily, it started as one of the biggest things that moved me to faith.
