Hurricanes Katrina Rita The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

Hurricanes Katrina Rita The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online: "When natural disasters strike elsewhere there is an instant deluge — especially in Britain — of what academics call theodicy, the philosophical problem that the existence of evil in a world created by a good God poses for believers. After the South Asian tsunami last year, atheists insisted that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents showed there could be no God. Even believers were forced to acknowledge the challenge for faith of such loss of life. But in America, after the devastation of Katrina, I can’t recall one single media discussion on the subject.

God has been very much on people’s minds, of course, after the disaster. But the events have, it seems, been taken as affirmation of his existence rather than refutation. There have been prayers of thanks for those who survived, prayers for the souls of those who died, prayers for the safe recovery of those still missing. Some — few, I emphasise, but some — have wondered whether the wrath wrought on New Or leans was some sort of divine punishment for the famously libertine soul of that city.

And yet, as if in tribute to Man’s own capacity to defy nature, even as the levees were being breached again, New Orleans is being rebuilt, the bars in the French Quarter are already reopening, solid proof that in this vast, God-fearing country, there is still plenty of room for sinners."