Lament a natural healthy response to unfair suffering and death has largely disappeared from
modern life and thought. This book reaffirms ancient Greek and Hebrew conceptions of lament as
a protest against death as fate. Richard A. Hughes finds lament to be basic in the Bible and
he traces the decline of lament beginning with Plato's antifeminist critique and early
Christian theodicy through the church fathers and the Protestant reformers. He shows that
lament was displaced by classical doctrines of providence but recaptured in the modern
existentialist revolt against unjust suffering. Hughes discusses the need for lament in the
present age of mass catastrophic death.
