“[A]nyone who ventures onto social media knows we’re firmly planted in an age of outrage,” The Presbyterian Outlook’s book review editor Amy Pagliarella writes. “We need help. Fast. Enter Franciscan friar and contemplative teacher Richard Rohr who [in The Tears of Things] looks to the biblical prophets.”
We should do as they did, Britain’s Church Times ventures in its critique of Tears: move “from anger at evil through…tears and sadness” to adopting “pure compassion as a mature response to evil. […] Only tears, Rohr says, can move…us beyond paralyzing anger at evil, death, and injustice, without losing the deep legitimacy of that anger.”
For The Englewood Review of Books, Daniel Rose explains how the author “argues that the prophetic journey consists of three movements: anger to sadness to hope.” Rohr provides “a framework for me,” he adds, “to be able to see beyond the rage, through tears, to the beauty.” Rose “highly recommends” the book to anyone “wrestling with how to engage the many challenges of our modern world.”
“The voice that comes across in these pages,” one Episcopal priest affirms, “is that of one who has a deep sense of ‘inner sustainment,’ achieved through decades of spiritual practice.”
The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage
By Richard Rohr
Convergent, 2025