"Touch The Wounds" by Tomáš Halík
On March 1, 2023, the University of Notre Dame Press will publish Tomáš Halík's new book Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation, translated by Gerald Turner. The book will be released during Lent.
Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scholar, Tomáš Halík is a best-selling author in Europe and the United States. His previous books with Notre Dame Press, I Want You to Be: On the God of Love (2016, 2019) and From the Underground Church to Freedom (2019), have sold thousands of copies. As in his earlier books, Touch the Wounds links spiritual and theological/philosophical topics with a tentative diagnosis of our times. 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.
Halík wrote the preface to the English translation of Touch the Wounds just as Covid was beginning to devastate the world. The timing was meaningful for a book that argues that Christians can discover the clearest vision of God by confronting suffering directly. Halik calls upon Christians to touch the wounds of the world and to rediscover their own faith by loving and healing their neighbors. Rather than demanding impossible, flawless faith, we can look through our doubt to see, touch, and confront the wounds in the hearts of our neighbors and—through that wounded humanity, which the Son of God took upon himself—see God.
"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
Here is a sermon titled Touch the Wounds that Father Halík delivered in English on April 19, 2020, to an empty church during the Covid pandemic lockdown.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tomáš Halík 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 the 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.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Gerald Turner has translated numerous authors from Czechoslovakia, including Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, and Ludvík Vaculík, among others. He received the US PEN Translation Award in 2004.
For more information, or to request an advance review copy, contact Kathryn Pitts, pitts.5@nd.edu, 574.631.3267.
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