He Qi “The texts of the empty tomb tradition take injustice, suffering, and death seriously but do not see them as having the last word,” the author writes. In this painting, Empty-Tomb by He Qi, women gather around Jesus’s empty grave. More

Tuvalu, a low-lying island in the Pacific Ocean, is already suffering the effects of rising seas due to climate change. Pleading with world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Tuvalu climate negotiator Ian Fry said, “The fate of my country rests in your hands.” Photo More

Creative Commons/chicagogeek “My Woodlawn-Roseland neighborhood has suffered a re-entrenchment of race-based poverty over the last two decades,” Sundquist writes. Here, a woman carries a child past the half-demolished remains of an old department store in Roseland. More

Janet McKenzie Mary Daly and subsequent feminist theologians have raised questions about whether the cross glorifies suffering. But the answer, the author writes, is not to drop the symbol, but to reframe it as a symbol of contemporary injustice. In this painting, Women Offered #5 , Janet More

If evolution itself is seen as wise and benevolent, even divine, how come it involves so much suffering? Or is there a better way to conceive of “evolutionary spirituality”? More

Most Americans want to believe that the United States is a positive force worldwide, but our militaristic foreign policy has caused widespread suffering. Credit: Truthout.org. More

Activists in Washington, D.C., urge Obama to push for a ceasefire amid Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in January 2009. Many at the time were hopeful that the president-elect would respond to the urgency of Palestinian suffering. More

AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis A Palestinian man cries after identifying the body of a loved one killed in Israel’s July 2014 attack on Gaza. “Settler Judaism” uses memories of past Jewish suffering to distract from Israel’s abuses against Palestinians. More

Gonkar Gyatso ( gonkargyatso.com ) The Buddha “concentrated on prevailing over greed, aggression, and illusory consciousness in order to overcome the suffering of the people,” the author writes. “It is not by accident that Buddhist economists are now among the most lucid critics of capitalism More

Creative Commons/Adam Jones For many theologians, the cross is a symbol not of blood redemption, but of hope even amid suffering. C. Kavin Rowe warns that excising the symbol of the cross would decimate the “specifically Christian impetus to work with and for those who are being bruised More

Taslima Akhter ( taslimaakhter.com ) A narrow focus on sexual assault can obscure how the structural violence of the global economy is also a central source of women’s suffering in the Global South. This photo, Death of Thousand Dreams by Taslima Akhter, captures the final embrace of two workers More