Book of the Week

On Tuesday, January 12, 2010, the shifting of tectonic plates along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault led to seismic activity registering 7.0 on the Richter scale and shaking the the island nation of Haiti.  Specifically, the capital city of Port-au-Prince, located just 10 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter, was shattered.  This event left unspeakable physical destruction in its wake, loss of human life and a nation in chaos.  As history well attests to, natural disasters of any magnitude lead to inevitable questions about faith and life.  More specifically, in religious circles, they lead to questions about God, God’s existence and presence.  Natural disasters are not the nascence of these questions but rather a catalyst to their intensification and urgency.  It is in this moment of intense urgency for answers that I offer the book of the week.

Gary Stern, a journalist for the Journal News (his blog can be found at LoHud),  recently interviewed a number of religious leaders across the spectrum of world religions to survey how each one specifically interpreted natural disasters and God’s role therein, if any.  He published his findings under the title, Can God Intervene? How Religion Explains Natural Disasters.  The most recent major natural disasters at the time of publication were Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Tsunami of 2004 (he devotes the entire first chapter to the Tsunami).  The second chapter is an historical survey of religious interpretations of natural disasters.  He also devotes attention in that chapter to the narrative of the flood story in Genesis and some time to the book of Job.  The remainder of the book consists of snippets from his interviews and his conclusions.

From the introduction, Stern writes, “What I have concluded myself is that this book offers a tremendous amount of wisdom from many of the top religious minds in the United States.  I appreciate their willingness to tell me what they believe, what they cannot believe, and what they can never know” (p.10).  Some of those interviews across the religious spectrum include names such as Harold Kushner, Tony Campolo, Dr. James Kone, Dr. Sayyid Syeed, Imam Yahya Hendi, Dr. Arvind Sharma, David Silverman and many others (43 total).  As the past week is a testament to, there are any number of religious and non-religious interpretations of natural disasters.  Stern’s study is a fair and wide-ranging survey of the cacophony of voices that may accompany the occurrences of such events.