Where the Hell Is God?
There's an interview at US Catholic with Richard Leonard SJ, author of Where the Hell Is God?. Here's the introduction to the interview ...
At dawn on his birthday, October 24, 1988, Father Richard Leonard’s phone rang. It was his mother, telling him that his sister Tracey had been in a terrible car accident. Her neck broken and her spine crushed, Tracey became a quadriplegic at age 28.
At the time of her accident, Tracey Leonard was the kind of woman some people call a saint. A nurse, she had spent more than three years working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. When she returned to her native Australia, she worked in a remote aboriginal community. “My sister was an extraordinary person. This was not a woman who was frivolous or who wasn’t, even by Catholic standards, doing heroic things with her life. She was doing all of that,” says her brother.
That’s why Leonard, a Jesuit who lectures worldwide on film and faith, was blown away when he read the letters that friends and acquaintances sent his family. Some claimed Tracey must have offended God; others said God had blessed her by sending such terrible suffering her way.
Meanwhile Tracey was asking her brother to kill her.
From this furnace of suffering, Leonard wrote Where the Hell is God? (Paulist Press, 2010) in which he scrutinizes our attempts to make sense of God’s role in human misery.
And you can watch a video by Fr. Leonard on the subject here - it's really worth a watch.
At dawn on his birthday, October 24, 1988, Father Richard Leonard’s phone rang. It was his mother, telling him that his sister Tracey had been in a terrible car accident. Her neck broken and her spine crushed, Tracey became a quadriplegic at age 28.
At the time of her accident, Tracey Leonard was the kind of woman some people call a saint. A nurse, she had spent more than three years working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. When she returned to her native Australia, she worked in a remote aboriginal community. “My sister was an extraordinary person. This was not a woman who was frivolous or who wasn’t, even by Catholic standards, doing heroic things with her life. She was doing all of that,” says her brother.
That’s why Leonard, a Jesuit who lectures worldwide on film and faith, was blown away when he read the letters that friends and acquaintances sent his family. Some claimed Tracey must have offended God; others said God had blessed her by sending such terrible suffering her way.
Meanwhile Tracey was asking her brother to kill her.
From this furnace of suffering, Leonard wrote Where the Hell is God? (Paulist Press, 2010) in which he scrutinizes our attempts to make sense of God’s role in human misery.
And you can watch a video by Fr. Leonard on the subject here - it's really worth a watch.
posted by crystal | 1:05 PM
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