Why, God?: Suffering Through Cancer into Faith

A nineteen-year-old chemistry major at Rhodes College is selected to spend the summer after her freshman year doing research at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Instead, she finds herself a patient there, fighting a life-threatening form of pediatric cancer and suffering through a year of aggressive chemotherapy and surgery. Refusing to believe what many tell her-that the cancer was all part of "God's plan" - she finds solace in journaling and begins a discussion with her grandfather, a university professor specializing in philosophy of religion. Through her experiences and writing about them, the student discovers that she may be a person of faith after all-just not in the way she expected. Her grandfather has selected and arranged the journal entries and their faith conversation and has commented on them in order to bring out the spiritual dimensions of her experience. He learns from his granddaughter that faith comes more through experience than through ideas. The coauthors hope the book will help other sufferers recognize the presence of a loving God in the midst of pain, uncertainty and death.

Margaret Carlisle Cupit is a summa cum laude graduate of Rhodes College. Both a former patient and a student research intern at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, she is first author of a chapter in Antimalarial Drug Research and Development and co-author of "End of Life Care for Hospitalized Children" for Pediatric Clinics of North America. She has travelled widely to speak for St. Jude and is now a student at Mayo Medical School.

Edward Hugh Henderson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. With David Hein, he is co-editor and a contributing author of Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of Austin Farrer and of C. S. Lewis and Friends: Faith and the Power of Imagination.


David Hein is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hood College, Maryland.