Thursday, September 01, 2005

Katrina and the Problem of Evil.

There is no satisfying answer. If there were, the theodicists would be out of business.

For my money, David Hart's commentary in the January WSJ about the tsunami is still wise.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days.

RTWT.

A few times.

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