There is a beautiful link connecting atheist Susan Sontag and God-fearing Job. Their stories of being radically faithful to their own principles has, nonetheless, taken them into the valley of the shadow of death, demanding from them that they faced the experience of illness in spite of their high moral, intellectual or social standards.
"Illness as Metaphor", as well as the book of Job, is a well articulated speech in defense of the author. Against the truth of their ages, Sontag and Job argue against superstition, respectively in favor of Reason and God. The question that remains, is: how could the righteous discourse of Sontag and Job resolve the paradoxal experience of illness without making use of the figures of punishment and atonement?
Different answers arise from these two diverse experiences of man's essential frailty and mortality. And so we start our reading for the month of June.
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