Friday, June 05, 2026

Finding Meaning in Suffering

 

Finding Meaning in Suffering

Dispatch Faith:  The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It., by Kelly M. Kapic (Covenant College), M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall (Biola University) & Jason McMartin (Biola University) (Co-Authors, When the Journey Hurts: Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul(2026)):

Benjamin Franklin famously declared that only death and taxes are certain. But he forgot one thing: Suffering is the third universal—as inescapable as mortality, as indifferent as the IRS.

Every major religion or philosophical system in human history has addressed the problem of suffering. Buddhism teaches acceptance and detachment—the goal is to loosen the grip of craving and desire that amplify pain, ultimately freeing the self from suffering’s hold. Secular modernity largely hands suffering to experts: therapists, physicians, pharmaceuticals, and self-optimization regimens. Suffering becomes a problem to be solved, a malfunction to be corrected. Stoicism, of the ancient and current life hack varieties, encourages cultivating indifference and yielding to fate. 

But Judaism and Christianity, at their best and growing out of their shared biblical tradition, offer something none of these does: a structured, communal practice for bringing honest anguish into relationship with a God who, the psalms insist, neither despises nor ignores the cry of the afflicted.

That practice is called lament. In the psalms, lament is a structured form of prayer that follows a discernible pattern: crying out to God, complaining, requesting, remembering God’s works, and—perhaps most surprisingly—often ending in praise of God. And for much of contemporary American Christianity, which we know best and have been studying for years, it has quietly disappeared. But research we’ve been conducting suggests the costs are both deeper and wider than most churches recognize.

The current season of Lent is a time for honest reckoning—40 days of sitting with mortality, limitation, and the long ache of a world not yet whole. It is, at least in theory, the one time of year when Christianity makes room for suffering rather than rushing past it. And yet for many people, Lent passes without ever touching what is actually hardest in their lives. 

That gap between what the church’s calendar invites and what its culture permits is where our research—compiled for our forthcoming book, When the Journey Hurts—begins.

When one of our research participants was asked what lament had done for her, she said something we’ve heard in different forms from many people we’ve interviewed: “I never gave myself permission to be honest with God. I think for a long time I really felt like I needed to put up a face for him because I wanted to give him what he wanted. But I had a wrong idea of what he wanted. He wants honesty from us.” …

 

Bloomberg: “Biofuel Groups Push IRS for New Model to Calculate Tax Credit”

Erin Schilling (Bloomberg): Biofuel Groups Push IRS for New Model to Calculate Tax Credit:


Saez and Zucman: The Case for California’s Billionaire Wealth Tax

Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley-Economics) and Gabriel Zucman (Paris School of Economics) have published a guest essay in the New York Times: “The Case for California’s Billionaire Wealth Tax.” From the article:

On taxes and much else, California has often led the country. In 1978 the state’s voters approved Proposition 13, which strongly limited tax increases. Prop 13 was the opening salvo in Ronald Reagan’s antitax revolution, which swept the United States two years later.

This year California’s voters could spearhead a shift in the opposite direction. A large labor union representing health care workers and advised by academic experts — including the two of us — got the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act on this November’s ballot. The proposed tax would be a one-time levy of 5 percent on billionaire wealth, spread over five years. If the measure passes, it would be the first tax targeted at the combined personal and business wealth of billionaires enacted anywhere in the world.

California is an ideal place to test this idea. The state needs money to fill a budget hole that the Trump administration created when it cut, among other things, Medicaid, a state-federal partnership that provides health coverage to low-income people. Without more state tax revenue to fill the loss in federal funding, the fraction of uninsured Californians will increase substantially, reversing part of the progress made since Obamacare.

More TaxProf Blog coverage on California’s billionaire wealth tax:

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