In the late medieval era, pain could be a symbol of holiness, disease, sin, or truth. It could be encouragement to lead a moral life, a punishment for wrong doing, or a method of healing. Exploring the varied depictions and descriptions of pain—from martyrdom narratives to practices of torture and surgery—The Modulated Scream attempts to decode this culture of suffering in the Middle Ages.

Esther Cohen brings to life the cacophony of howls emerging from the written record of physicians, torturers, theologians, and mystics. In considering how people understood suffering, explained it, and meted it out, Cohen discovers that pain was imbued with multiple meanings. While interpreting pain was the province only of the rarified elite, harnessing pain for religious, moral, legal, and social purposes was a practice that pervaded all classes of Medieval life. In the overlap of these contradicting attitudes about what pain was for—how it was to be understood and who should use it—Cohen reveals the distinct and often conflicting cultural traditions and practices of late medieval Europeans. Ambitious and wide-ranging, The Modulated Scream is intellectual history at its most acute.

From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right” kind of asylum seeker, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she discovered how applicants learned to craft a specific narrative to satisfy the system’s requirements.

Kanaaneh tells the stories of four Arab asylum seekers who sought protection in the United States on the basis of their gender or sexuality: Saud, who relived painful memories of her circumcision and police harassment in Sudan and then learned to number and sequence these recollections; Fatima, who visited doctors and therapists in order to document years of spousal abuse without over-emphasizing her resulting mental illness; Fadi, who highlighted the homophobic motivations that provoked his arrest and torture in Jordan, all the while omitting connected issues of class and racism; and Marwa, who showcased her private hardships as a lesbian in a Shiite family in Lebanon and downplayed her environmental activism. The Right Kind of Suffering is a compelling portrait of Arab asylum seekers whose success stories stand in contrast with those whom the system failed.

The American Civil War is often seen as the first modern war, not least because of its immense suffering. Yet unlike later conflicts, it did not produce an outpouring of disillusionment or cynicism, as most people continued to portray the war in highly sentimental and patriotic terms. While scholars typically dismiss this everyday writing as simplistic or naïve, Frances M. Clarke argues that we need to reconsider the letters, diaries, songs, and journalism penned by Union soldiers and their caregivers to fully understand the war’s impact and meaning.

In War Stories, Clarke revisits the most common stories that average Northerners told in hopes of redeeming their suffering and loss—stories that enabled people to make sense of their hardship, and to express their beliefs about religion, community, and personal character. From tales of Union soldiers who died heroically to stories of tireless volunteers who exemplified the Republic’s virtues, War Stories sheds new light on this transitional moment in the history of war, emotional culture, and American civic life.

This book can best be described as an extended meditation on suffering, phenomenological in method and dialectical in point of view. The angle the author takes is that of moral self-examination rather that conventional scholarly inquiry, and his aim is to think through and evaluate a fundamental claim of our culture, from Aeschylus to Solzhenitsyn, that suffering is the greatest spiritual teacher.

To bring the argument closer to home, Professor Miller focuses on the experience of crisis as the undermining of our attempts, at all costs, to keep control of our lives. This leads him to discuss topics such as the nature of vulnerability, the difference—as sketched by Heidegger—between ordinary fear and metaphysical dread, the ordinary avoidance of suffering, and the heroic willingness to embrace it exemplified by Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

But this is a philosophical essay, not a historical monograph, and Miller's goal is to lead the reader ever deeper in to the heart of crisis where all our illusions about control are stripped away and we forced to face, like Oedipus, the harshest reality of all: that even our existence is not something we can claim as our own. It is here, and only here, Miller claims, the issue of religious conversion can be and must be seriously faced.

This is a demanding book, as exhilarating as it is relentless in its unmasking of the evasions and duplicities with which we shore up our day-to-day lives. The late William F. Lynch, SJ, author of Christ and Apollo, called it "a profoundly moral study of man." To read it is to risk changing your life.