San Antonio College Library

Pietà is a collection of essays by the Hungarian-Swedish biologist, George Klein, first published in Sweden in 1989. It includes nine essays by Klein, several touching broadly on the theme of whether life is worth living. The introduction opens with a quote from Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental...

Ethics; Suffering - Moral and ethical aspects.

Thirty-one essays on some of the most influential artists of our time and two saints of all time-- Lucia Joyce, writer's block, Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, Joseph Roth, Andrea de Jorio, Mary Magdalene, Vaslav Nijinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Frederick Ashton, Jerome Robbins, Suzanne Farrell, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, M.F.K. Fisher, Saul...

Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural...

Master Sheng-yen, a dharma descendant from the founders of Buddhism in China, considers the concepts of suffering, enlightenment, and compassion; provides a glossary of key terms; and briefly recaps the history of Buddhism in China. But he goes beyond these issues to discuss contemporary matters and questions he has encountered in his years of teaching in the United States. Sometimes personal and always instructive, Sheng-yen's introductory work is...

Long before it cured disease, medicine aimed to relieve suffering-but despite that precedence, the relief of suffering often takes a back seat in today's biomedical research and treatment. Modern bioethics, too, has been slow to come to terms with suffering. Attention to ethical quandaries has sometimes displaced attention to the experience of patients. This book seeks to place suffering at the center of bioethical thinking once again. Among the questions...

Every human journey is filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments, or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Thomas Moore's extensive career as a psychologist and theologian has taught him that honoring these periods of fragility as periods of...

One of this century's most eminent theologians addresses the eternal questions of the relationship of good and evil, linking the story of Job to the lives of the poor and oppressed of our world.