Novelist Describes the Pain of Miscarriage

In Elizabeth Strout's novel The Burgess Boys, a young woman named Susan has a miscarriage. After learning that the baby was a girl, her husband tries ...

Journey to Unbelief Often Involves Trauma

The Christian scholar Larry Taunton launched a nationwide campaign to interview college students who are members of Secular Student Alliances—the ...

Man Saddened that Friends Can't Share His Grief

The British novelist Julian Barnes tried to capture the loneliness of what he calls "grief-work." After thirty years of marriage, his wife Pat died from ...

Ambulance Driver Reflects on Newtown Tragedy

[Shortly after Christmas 2012], I addressed the New England town of Newtown, Connecticut, a community reeling from the murder of 20 schoolchildren ...

Is Grief a Form of Mental Illness?

The New York Times ran a moving article about a professor whose son died from a drug overdose. There's a lot to mull over in this article, including ...

A Giant Redwood Falls

On March 24, 1991, one of the oldest and largest Redwoods in California crashed to the ground.

People call the tree the Dyerville Giant, and it lies where ...

TV Show Parenthood: How not to Deal with Suffering

A 2012 episode of the TV show Parenthood titled "Everything Is Not OK" focused on a character named Kristina Braverman who has been diagnosed with breast ...

Father Explains Death to His Son

In the fall of 1991, a car driven by a drunk driver jumped its lane and smashed headfirst into a minivan driven by Jerry Sittser. Sittser and three of ...

Children's Book Character Carries His "Sadness Shield"

We all seem to need a strategy for coping with the experience of grief. In the screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book Where the ...

African Boy Experiences the Healing Power of Community

Professor Robert Wicks tells the following story about how one of his African students discovered the healing power of an entire community:

When the student ...