When Bad Things Happen To Good People

Why isn’t life fair? What do we mean by justice? Do we have free will? How do we explain misfortune that seems to be no one’s fault? You don’t have to be religious or part of an Abrahamic faith tradition for those issues to gnaw at you. No biblical book—and perhaps no book of any kind—so focuses on these questions as The Book of Job. As we explore both Job and Archibald MacLeish’s modernized version of Job, the play J.B., we’ll help one another to wrestle with Job’s questions, which, after all, are our questions, too.

Recommended Reading:

The Bible, preferably though not required, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version, ISBN‎ 978-0190276089 (softcover) or ISBN 978-0190276089 (hardcover); Archibald MacLeish, J. B., ISBN 978-0395083536. 

Frank Strasburger has been an Episcopal priest for nearly 45 years, spending much of his vocation in campus ministry. A Jew by birth who became a Christian as an adult, he continues to wrestle with the questions Job raises, which faith traditions, including his own, too often answer too easily.