Artistic expression frequently engages with the question of suffering. In so doing, it confronts the gravity and complexity of the human condition. This volume investigates the relationship between art and suffering. In short, the contributors to this volume collectively demonstrate that suffering is an undisputed and shareable motivating experience. This collection features original essays that focus on the subject of art and suffering, including topics such as the representation of violence and the intersections of art and human rights. Some of the key questions explored are as follows: How has suffering motivated artists around the world? How have artists used their platforms to call attention to human rights abuses? How can suffering be incorporated responsibly and ethically in works of art? What role does art play in the struggle against violations of human dignity and the promotion of building a more equitable world? Each essay is complemented by full-color reproductions of artistic works that illustrate the concepts being discussed, including a graphic essay on the topic of “comfort women.”

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

Beyond Theodicy analyzes the rising tide of objections to explanations and justifications for why God permits evil and suffering in the world. In response to the Holocaust, striking parallels have emerged between major Jewish and Christian thinkers centering on practical faith approaches that offer meaning within suffering. Author Sarah K. Pinnock focuses on Jewish thinkers Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch and Christian thinkers Gabriel Marcel and Johann Baptist Metz to present two diverse rejections of theodicy, one existential, represented by Buber and Marcel, and one political, represented by Bloch and Metz. Pinnock interweaves the disciplines of philosophy of religion, post-Holocaust thought, and liberation theology to formulate a dynamic vision of religious hope and resistance.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Twenty-three political essays that focus on the victims of history, from the fallen maquis of the French Resistance to the casualties of the Cold War. In the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Albert Camus said that a writer "cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it." Resistance, Rebellion and Death displays Camus' rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century: The Stranger, The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

The Doukhobors, Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Canada beginning in 1899, are known primarily to the Canadian public through the sensationalist images of them as nude protestors, anarchists, and religious fanatics - representations largely propagated by government commissions and the Canadian media. In Negotiating Memory, Julie Rak examines the ways in which autobiographical strategies have been employed by the Doukhobors themselves in order to retell and reclaim their own history. Drawing from oral interviews, court documents, government reports, prison diaries, and media accounts, Rak demonstrates how the Doukhobors employed both "classic" and alternative forms of autobiography to communicate their views about communal living, vegetarianism, activism, and spiritual life, as well as to pass on traditions to successive generations. More than a historical work, this book brings together recent theories concerning subjectivity, autobiography, and identity, and shows how Doukhobor autobiographical discourse forms a series of ongoing negotiations for identity and collective survival that are sometimes successful and sometimes not. An innovative study, Negotiating Memory will appeal to those interested in autobiography studies as well as to historians, literary critics, and students and scholars of Canadian cultural studies.

Assessing issues related to the Orthodox Church from an academic, secular point of view is a sensitive matter. However, by tracing and interpreting the engagement of the Serbian Church with the memory of Serbian heroic victimhood in World War II through a kind of “methodological agnosticism,” this volume has managed to tackle the subtle topic in a very delicate and value-neutral way. Arguing that the search for a collective memory is particularly urgent in the face of societal uncertainty and that religious institutions often use their memory potential to reaffirm their public relevance, the book examines the motivations, forms, strategies, and outcomes of a wide range of mnemonic activities the Serbian Orthodox Church engaged in following the upheavals caused by the collapse of Yugoslav socialism, the violent dissolution of the country, and the fall of the Milošević regime. These activities, taking place within the memory fields framed by the post-socialist, post-conflict, and post-secular horizons, took liturgical and non-liturgical forms, often involving a hybrid fusion of the two. As a result of this mnemonic endeavor, the author argues, the Church was successful in reasserting its power and legitimacy in the public sphere of post-2000 Serbia.

Gandolfo constructs a theological anthropology that begins with the condition of human vulnerability as a site to answer why human beings experience and inflict terrible suffering. This volume argues that vulnerability is a dimension of human existence that causes us great anxiety, which forms the basis for violence but also affords the possibility of human openness to the redemptive work of divine love. Poised paradoxically between tragic and redemptive vulnerability, human beings need existential resources and empowering practices to cope with and manage our vulnerability in more compassionate ways.

The concept of death, particularly violent death, is prevalent throughout the writings of Paul the Apostle. His letters in the New Testament address this topic from a variety of perspectives, some of which can appear to be almost contradictory. However, this need not be problematic. Paul and Death uses the method of psychological exegesis to show that the different attitudes toward death in Paul’s letters make for a much more coherent discourse if they are seen as an aid to individual and collective psychological coping. Taking the differences between each of Paul’s letters as its starting point, this study suggests that a variety of coping strategies in relation to death may be beneficial depending on the situation, the person, and the stage of the coping process. Drawing on psychologically-oriented hermeneutic theory, and theories about psychological coping in particular, the author argues that each case of psychological coping must be understood in its historical situation, and as strategies emanating from a specific person’s subjective appraisal. Combining theology and biblical studies with modern psychology, this book will be of particular interest to academics and students that are studying the relationship between Religion and notions of Death.

During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.

Ambiguous Memory examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monumnets to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. The book discusses how certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to deal with it as one country. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views. Providing a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and the 1990s, this work contributes to a better understanding of contemporary national identity and society. The author shows how public debate over such issues at Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the renarration of Buchenwald as Nazi and Soviet internment camp, the Goldhagen controversy, and the Holocaust Memorial debate in Berlin contribute to the complexities surrounding the way Germans see themselves, their relationship to the past, and their future identity as a nation. In a careful analysis, the author shows how the past was used and abused by both the East and the West in the 1980s, and how these approaches merged in the 1990s. This interesting new work takes a sociological approach to the role of memory in forging a new, integrative national identity.