Does God Care About Suffering? – Dr. Christopher Mooney
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Christopher Mooney asks "whether God really cares about our suffering" and uses biblical narratives, the significance of Christ’s tears, and philosophical responses to death in order to answer in the affirmative, ultimately showing that God can form a greater good from evil without making the evil into something good.
This lecture was given on October 9th, 2025, at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Christopher Mooney is an assistant professor of theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches on Catholic theology, scriptural interpretation, and the Church Fathers. His teaching and research specialize in Augustine, the Fathers, and historical theology, and he is the author of Augustine's Theology of Justification by Faith (2026). A native of Connecticut, he studied at Georgetown and Yale Divinity School before receiving his PhD from the University of Notre Dame. He also serves as a theological representative for the USCCB's Catholic-Reformed dialogue. He lives next door to the Augustine Institute's campus with his wife and four children.
Keywords: Biblical Meaning of Suffering, Christ’s Tears and the Cross, Divine Providence, Faith and Hope, Forgiveness, Permitted Evil, Problem of Evil, Suffering and Eternal Joy, Tragedy of Death, Wrong Ways to Explain Suffering
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.7 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
| 0:19.3 | To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org. |
| 0:25.5 | The topic of tonight's talk is, does God care about suffering the death of Socrates |
| 0:31.6 | versus the death of Christ? |
| 0:34.0 | And thank you, all of you, for your patience with my flight delay. Of course, the Latin word |
| 0:39.9 | patience comes from the same word as the word for suffering. So thank you for your suffering. |
| 0:46.1 | As a quick note, if anyone is listening to this recording, there are two paintings that I'm going |
| 0:51.8 | to talk about later that I'd be referencing. |
| 0:55.5 | The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David from 1787, and the Eisenheim altarpiece |
| 1:03.5 | painted by Matthias Grunwald in 1516. |
| 1:08.3 | If anyone doesn't have those images, I think there are handouts in the back. |
| 1:13.7 | But anyway, if anyone's listening to this recording, as I have sometimes had the experience |
| 1:18.1 | of doing, I'm speaking here to the microphone, those are the two paintings that I'm going to talk |
| 1:23.9 | about. Okay. Let's begin. St. John Christ's |
| 1:28.7 | them says no event is so sublime as this. The blood of God has been poured out for us. |
| 1:35.4 | It is more than our adoption as children, more than any other thing, that God did not |
| 1:41.1 | spare his only son. This is by far the greatest thing. |
| 1:46.0 | This talk is about two deaths |
| 1:49.0 | and how they help us to think about the great problem of suffering. |
| 1:52.0 | Let's start with the first death, that is Socrates. |
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