Affliction: A Compassionate Look at the Reality of Pain and Suffering

A great book for helping to understand affliction. Very helpful for learning to use affliction for personal growth and for experiencing increased intimacy with God. I recommend it to anyone who has lost a loved one, lost a leg, lost a job and/or suffered any pain or loss during their life's journey.

It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes.

The value occupies a high place in our usual conversations and attracts our daily behavior. It also occupies a large area of research topics in the social sciences and is of particular importance in religion, art and philosophy.

The thesis of the book is that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realisation of his individual self.

Freedom, though it has brought him his independence and rationality, has isolated him, and made him anxious and powerless.

This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.