<p> The topics of suffering and death appear throughout the Epistle to the Hebrews but have rarely been examined in New Testament scholarship. This study offers a thorough investigation of each reference to these topics in the epistle using semantic domain analysis. Incorporating the work of linguist M.A.K. Halliday, it then attempts to connect these topics to the social situation addressed by the author of Hebrews. It is determined that the author is responding to the reality of suffering in the lives of his audience. This is closely connected to a perceived threat or fear of death on the part of the probable recipients. With this social context in place, this study examines how the author responds to this situation by creating models of endurance in suffering and death. The author establishes these exemplars in order to motivate his audience toward similar endurance within their own social context.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Sjuksköterskans ansvar är att lindra lidande. Vårdverksamheten och vårdforskningens största utmaningar är att förstå hur lidande bäst kan lindras. Lidande som orsakas av vården kallas vårdlidande. Den systematiska litteraturstudiens syfte var att pröva Katie Erikssons teori om vårdlidande inom omvårdnad. En deduktiv ansats användes vid genomförandet av studien. Studien genererade tolv resultatartiklar som analyserades enligt Erikssons följande kategorier om vårdlidande kränkning av värdighet, fördömelse och straff, maktutövning och utebliven vård. De mest förekommande kategorierna som identifierades utifrån resultatet var kränkning av värdighet och utebliven vård. En ytterligare kategori som framkom benämdes vårdens prioriteringar. Den kan ses som en utveckling av Erikssons kategori utebliven vård. Resultatet bekräftade Erikssons teori om vårdlidande. Rekommendationer för klinisk verksamhet är att patienten ska få möjlighet att utvärdera vården i efterhand, för att skapa en medvetenhet hos vårdpersonalen kring patientens upplevelse. Vidare rekommenderas forskning om vårdens prioriteringar. / Nurses’ responsibility is to alleviate suffering. The main challenge for healthcare organisation and the science of caring and nursing is to understand how suffering could be alleviated. Suffering caused by care is called suffering related to care. The aim of the study was to test and imply Katie Erikssons theory about suffering related to care in nursing. The systematic review was performed with a deductive research method. Twelve articles was analysed according to Erikssons theory about suffering related to care. The theory includes three themes: violating the patients dignity, condemnation and punishment, exert of power and absence of care. The themes that occurred the most in the results were violating the patients’ dignity and absence of care. Another theme was developed through the results was healthcare priorities. The theory can be interpreted as a subtheme to absence of care. Erikssons theory was validated by the results of the study. One implication for clinical practice is to give the patients ability to evaluate their received healthcare. The purpose of the evaluation is to make the health care professionals aware of the patients’ experience. Further research about healthcare priorities are suggested.

This study examines the transaction of the lived experience of ‘suffering’ in the process of psychotherapy. ‘Suffering’ is conceptualised as having its weight and value transacted between a psychotherapist and his or her client. As a psychotherapist from a family with a disabled member, my fieldwork in a hospital with the parents of disabled children was conducted in Taiwan. The development of our therapeutic relationship was discovered as the process of ‘suffering transaction’: the interaction of lived experience of suffering between my clients and myself. Two clients took part in this study in which eight to ten sessions of counselling or psychotherapy were conducted and transcribed as the research data. The data also included my lived experience, which was made explicit in this field work through records of six sessions of therapeutic supervision and my self-reflective therapeutic diary and research journal. Inspired by Gee’s (2000) work on data presentation, my understanding of client’s stories is represented as poetic form. Reflections from the use of reflexivity explore the inter-correlations of ‘suffering’ between us. The theoretical perspective informing the further analysis of this study is hermeneutic phenomenology and social suffering. The socio-cultural embodiments in language are explored as the hermeneutic horizons of the theme of suffering transaction. Politically, the development of ‘early intervention’ in Taiwan creates as ‘unjust’ context for those encountering medical services, and this shared understanding of the medical bureaucracy influenced the psychotherapeutic encounter. The analysis also explores the influence of Confucian approaches to gender difference and family ethics, and Christian religious beliefs, in relation to the self-identification of my clients in suffering for other. These three horizons indicate that searching for the meaning of suffering is an inter-subjective process that entails taking the responsibility for the ‘Other’ as the symbolic socio-cultural body. The thesis concludes with discussion about the ethics of the therapeutic relationship. I argue that in psychotherapy, both therapist and client are engaged in the Levinasian idea of the primordial responsibility ‘for’ the other. In the context of wider debates about psychotherapy as an ethical practice, I argue that a therapist has the pre-moral position of not only witnessing client’s lived experience of suffering but also being witnessed by the client. This study provides an example in which the context of ‘witness’ is inter-subjectively developed in psychotherapy.

by Chan Chi Kin. / Thesis (M.Div.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1988. / Bibliography: leaves 166-177.

People of late antiquity were subjected to the universal and perennial human woes - injustice, affliction, adversity and pain - that cause suffering. The experience of suffering is subjective. There are however, common sources of and expressions of suffering in humans. The fourth century was a period of significant cultural and social changes which drew responses from pagans that not only reflected traditional knowledge but also engaged with new sets of ideas. This thesis examines the problem of evil and suffering as experienced by pagans of the fourth century of the Common Era. Having received imperial sanction from the emperor Constantine after his conversion in 312, Christianity was gaining momentum in both membership and strength. The Graeco-Roman world had become one where Christianity, it seemed to some, had effectively surpassed pagan state cult Against this backdrop of religious change, pagans had taken on a self-consciousness that engendered a rethinking of many traditional ways of coping with and explaining the evils of the world and the suffering that could result from them. Some rules and conditions had changed, so how and where could pagans seek explanation for, protection from or alleviation of their suffering? The study addresses this question by posing and responding to further questions. Firstly, how did pagans understand the presence of evil and suffering in the world? Secondly, from what sources, natural or supernatural, could they draw hope in the face of evil and suffering? And thirdly, what degree of autonomy could pagans claim in approaching the problem? Religion and philosophy might be perceived by pagans to contain the answers to why there was evil and suffering in the world. The addition of science and the occult to religion and philosophy offered further ways through which pagans might seek to deal with the problem. By drawing primarily on extant literary evidence from the period as well as selected material evidence (predominantly pagan, but including some Christian), the research will trace the evolution of ideas regarding evil and suffering that pagan thinkers were bringing to the contemporary debate. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

Thesis (Th. M.)--Trinity International University, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-144).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-218).

Simone Weil is best known to the world as a mystic and a philosopher. She died in 1943 at the age of 34, ostensibly because she refused the hypernutrition prescribed for the treatment of her tuberculosis. Shortly after her death, thanks to the posthumous publication of her work, she was recognised as one of the twentieth centuries most original thinkers in areas as diverse as philosophy, political history, religion, and ethics. Few writers have delved into the foundational relationship she discerned between a destructive form of suffering she called "affliction" and the experience of divine love. The present dissertation exposes how this fundamental relationship lies at the centre of Weil's life and thought. / First, we correlate biographical details of Weil's life with key insights into the reality of affliction. Second, the nature of human suffering is treated as a theological concept. Through Weil we consider the limits of creatureliness to the point at which one no longer feels a part of the human community. Third, we examine Weil's insight into the radical possibility of love in response to the annihilating experience of affliction, that is, the experience of God's love for us as well as the possibility of loving the afflicted neighbour. Finally, we consider several critiques of Weil's sense of her own identity as a woman and as a Jew, and the impact of this identity crisis on her unique understanding of the relationship between suffering and the love of God.