This March 2023, the University of Notre Dame Press will publish Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation by Tomáš Halík. For a limited time, we are giving away advance copies! Enter to win by filling out the form at the bottom of this post. This offer expires January 31st and is open to US residents only.
Can’t wait to start reading? Reviewers, bookstore employees, librarians, and other members of the book industry can request an e-galley through Edelweiss here. We encourage you to leave a review if you enjoyed the book.
“One of the most profound meditations on suffering, from a Christian perspective, that I have ever read.”
—James Martin, SJ, author of Learning to Pray
One of the most important voices in contemporary Catholicism, Tomáš Halík argues that Christians can discover the clearest vision of God not by turning away from suffering but by confronting it. Halík calls upon us to follow the apostle Thomas’s example: to see the pain, suffering, and poverty of our world and to touch those wounds with faith and action. It is those expressions of love and service, Halík reveals, that restore our hope and the courage to live, allowing true holiness to manifest itself. Only face-to-face with a wounded Christ can we lay down our armor and masks, revealing our own wounds and allowing healing to begin.
Tomáš Halík is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scholar. He is a professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague, pastor of the Academic Parish of St. Salvator Church in Prague, president of the Czech Christian Academy, and a winner of the Templeton Prize. His previous books with University of Notre Dame Press, I Want You to Be (2016, 2019) and From the Underground Church to Freedom (2019), were selected as the Foreword Reviews’ INDIES Book of the Year Awards in Philosophy and in Religion, respectively.
“We’re part of a world full of wounds. For many people, the dark cloud of pain conceals the certainty of faith; the face of a benevolent God is hidden in the darkness that we are passing through together. But the Easter scene that inspired this book can speak to us with enormous urgency precisely at such a time. It is through Jesus’s wounds that the apostle Thomas sees God.”
—from the preface