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Books

Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering by Scott Samuelson

Doug Phillips arms us against the slings and arrows, as he tries to find a point to pointless suffering.

When indie band The Smiths were still together, and I, falling apart, was listening wistfully to their records, I remember always feeling run over by their first album’s last track, ‘Suffer Little Children’. A funeral march of mournful chords and lyrical melancholy, the song recounts the serial murders in the 1960s of five children in Manchester, some of whose bodies were found buried in the local moors. They had been sexually assaulted.

For many, any attempt to make sense of pointless suffering must first begin with the suffering of innocents. Scott Samuelson begins his own ruminations in Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering with his witnessing, as a young boy, a friend being struck and killed by a speeding car.

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