As we write, Isaac is now officially at hurricane strength, and on a path toward the Louisiana coast—seven years to the day after Katrina’s devastating assault. And while the media licks its chops at the very newsworthy possibility of a GOP convention blown to bits by an act of God, our thoughts are with those who anxiously await Isaac’s landfall.
We thought this would be a good time to bring back some of our finest writers’ meditations on the highs—and lows—that arise from the human need to find meaning in natural disaster.
—The Eds.
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Seven Years, Seven Stories
In the Dark Night of Disaster
ANTHONY B. PINN • Sep 18, 2008
While it is a natural impulse to ask, the most important question is not where God is in all of this (whether raised as matter of faith or as critique from a posture of disbelief). Rather, the proper question is how can I act in such a way as to represent the best of my convictions (whether framed as the consequences of religion or whether more secular in origin)? Our theologizing Hurricane Ike and other disasters, again, is an understandable impulse, but it does not help folks rebuild and revive their lives.
Unnatural Disaster: When Conservative Theology & The Free Market Meet Wildfires
PAUL HARVEY • Jul 2, 2012
Fires are different from tornadoes and other clearly natural disasters, because fires in the American West are necessary, inevitable, and healthy; an ecologically-cleansing process allowing for the renewal of natural lands. And fires such as Colorado Springs just experienced, while certainly natural disasters to a degree, are also man-made disasters, like the destruction leveled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s just that our religious platitudes of God’s wrath, and God’s reassurance, make it difficult to understand the indispensable human contribution to these catastrophes.
Tornado Hits the Heartland: Is God Punishing Us?
JAY MICHAELSON • May 23, 2011
The irony here is that many of these weather events actually are a kind of “punishment”—not in the conservative-theological sense of tit-for-tat justice meted out by an Abusive Father on High, but in the more progressive-theological sense of unforeseen consequences of reckless human actions. Climate scientists have said for years that global climate change will lead to increased severe weather events, and now they appear to be here; along with droughts and poor harvests caused by shifting climatic belts. On a planetary basis, we are reaping what we have sown for two hundred years.
Tokyo Governor Says Tsunami is Divine Punishment—Religious Groups Ignore Him
LEVI MCLAUGHLIN • Mar 17, 2011
While it appears as if Japan, like America, has its share of vocal public figures eager to equate disaster with apocalypse and to use mass human suffering as an excuse to propagandize, Japanese religious groups have joined together—largely under the media radar—to help in the relief effort.
The Heresy of End Times Predictions
LOUIS A. RUPRECHT • Jun 6, 2011
Apocalyptically-minded souls—nationalist and Republican, and all-too-knowing virtually to a person—are also ironically the most anti-democratic forces that contemporary Christianity has produced.
Israeli Forest Fire as Divine Punishment, Religious Leaders (From Both Sides) Agree
IRA CHERNUS • Dec 6, 2010
Rather than kowtow to an ancient who treats natural disaster in much the same way as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell and makes outrageous anti-Palestinian remarks, Obama could use the power that he possesses, even over Israel, to set forth a peace plan of his own and say, “Take it or leave it.”
‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance
ANTHEA BUTLER, MICHELLE GONZALEZ MALDONADO, SARAH POSNER, BECKY GARRISON AND MATT RECLA • Jan 15, 2010
Using “demons” to explain natural disasters is not anything new. What is new is how the language of the demonic has been used to describe a natural disaster that happens to anyone other than a Christian, and often, a Christian of European extraction. It is on par with the notion of “Slave-holding Christianity” about which Frederick Douglass spoke so eloquently. What’s more, this narrative of “curse” is used often to remind any person of color that if you go up against the white man, God is most likely to punish you in perpetuity.
