Tears are a common experience we rarely discuss, and then only in relation to pain and loss. David Runcorn draws upon a long Christian tradition of seeing tears as a gift to explore their deeper meaning and purpose, their place in human life and their significance for prayer and spirituality. In the early centuries of the church tears were regarded as an extension of baptism or a gift of the Spirit. They were integral to prayer and a vital part of human integration and maturing. Jesus said that those who mourn were 'blessed'. The Language of Tears explores how tears are a natural and important way of processing loss, uncertainty and anxiety, drawing upon theology, scripture, psychology and biology. This accessible and sensitive guide is for all engaged in spiritual direction, counselling or pastoral care.

In this intriguing study, bestselling author Jeffrey Kottler provides insightful and surprising answers to questions such as: Why do we cry? How are tears interpreted in different cultures? When is crying therapeutic and when does it become self-destructive? This text challenges conventional attitudes toward tears and shows how valuable they can be.

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

The Language of Tears details the engaging five-year experience of a gifted American scholar throughout her journey teaching and participating in a Shi'a Muslim community in Southern California. As a teacher in a Muslim school, she participates in the lives of Iranian, Iraqi, and Pakistani women as they perform their religious rituals. Initially thought to be an FBI informant, Blomfield builds trust as she participates in every aspect of their lives. Only a few weeks after she starts teaching, the fifth-grade girls invite her to attend a religious ritual after school. Sitting, covered in black, she starts to engage: hearing the laments of the women, she too starts to weep. She is invited into the women's homes, where they share their hopes, dreams, and fears. She dances at weddings, baby showers, and a Mother's Day "women's only" swim party. She is deeply honored when she is invited to ritually wash and bury an old Iranian woman's body, erupting a love for her own mother and her imminent death. Finally, she travels to Iran for a surreal religious pilgrimage where she becomes Shi'a "in her heart," becoming more fully human.

This provocative and indispensable book provides a natural and cultural history of our most mysterious and complex human function: our ability to shed tears. All humans, and only humans, weep. Tears are sometimes considered pleasurable, sometimes dangerous, mysterious, deceptive, or profound. Tears of happiness, tears of joy, the proud tears of a parent, tears of mourning, tears of laughter, tears of defeat --what do they have in common? Why is it that at times of victory, success, love, reunion, and celebration the outward signs of our emotions are identical to those of our most profound experiences of loss? Why We Cry looks at the many different ways people have understood weeping, from the earliest known representation of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. through the latest neurophysiological research. Despite our most common romantic assumptions, what this brilliant book tells us is that tears are never pure, they are never simple.

Seeing Through Tears is a groundbreaking examination of crying behavior and the meaning behind our tears. Drawing from attachment theory and her own original research, Judith Nelson presents an exciting new view of crying as a part of our inborn equipment for establishing and maintaining emotional connections. In a comprehensive look at crying through the life cycle, this insightful volume presents a novel theoretical framework before offering useful and practical advice for dealing with this most fundamental of human behaviors.

“When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photographs, you might think you’re looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you’re looking at her tears. . . . [There’s] poetry in the idea that our emotional terrain bears visual resemblance to the physical world; that our tears can look like the vistas we see out an airplane window. Fisher’s images are the only remaining trace of these places, which exist during a moment of intense feeling—and then vanish.” —NPR “[A] delicate, intimate book. . . . In The Topography of Tears photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher shows us a place where language strains to express grief, longing, pride, frustration, joy, the confrontation with something beautiful, the confrontation with an onion.” —Boston Globe Does a tear shed while chopping onions look different from a tear of happiness? In this powerful collection of images, an award-winning photographer trains her optical microscope and camera on her own tears and those of men, women, and children, released in moments of grief, pain, gratitude, and joy, and captured upon glass slides. These duotone photographs reveal the beauty of recurring patterns in nature and present evocative, crystalline imagery for contemplation. Underscored by poetic captions, they translate the mysterious act of crying into an atlas mapping the structure and magnificence of our interior lives. Rose-Lynn Fisher is an artist and author of the International Photography Award-winning studies Bee and The Topography of Tears. Her photographs are exhibited in galleries, festivals, and museums across the world and have been featured by the Dr. Oz Show, NPR, Smithsonian, Harper’s, New Yorker, Time, Wired, Reader’s Digest, Discover, Brain Pickings, and elsewhere. She received her BFA from Otis Art Institute and lives in Los Angeles.

From childhood, willful, intelligent Saira Qader broke the boundaries between her family's traditions and her desire for independence. A free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American of Indo-Pakistani descent, she rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, the world her home. Five years later, tragedy strikes, throwing Saira's life into turmoil. Now the woman who chased the world to uncover the details of other lives must confront the truths of her own. In need of understanding, she looks to the stories of those who came before—her grandparents, a beloved aunt, her mother and father. As Saira discovers the hope, pain, joy, and passion that defined their lives, she begins to face what she never wanted to admit—that choice is not always our own, and that faith is not just an intellectual preference.

This thoughtful, poetic book uses metaphors and beautiful imagery to explore the reasons for our tears. In a soft voice, Mario asks, “Mother, why do we cry?” And his mother begins to tell him about the many reasons for our tears. We cry because our sadness is so huge it must escape from our bodies. We cry because we don’t understand the world, and our tears go in search of an answer. Most important, she tells him, we cry because we feel like crying. And, as she shows him then, sometimes we feel like crying for joy. This warm, reassuring hug of a book makes clear that everyone is allowed to cry, and that everyone does.