Further Reflections on the Tsunami Disaster

• Reflections on the Tsunami disaser, from A Penitent Blogger.

• Making Sense Out of Suffering, by Peter Kreeft. (via Just Bein' Frank).

• From Donald Sensing (One Hand Clapping), a Salvation Army officer in Sri Lanka finds reason to give thanks to God.

• Patrick (Oxblog) provides an extensive list of organizations assisting in the tsunami relief effort.

• Indepundit reflects on the indifference of nature:
  NATURE HAPPENS – She doesn’t care whether you are an environmentalist or an industrialist, rich or poor, good or evil, black or white, Right or Left. She is neither vengeful nor forgiving. Elections, wars, and treaties do not constrain her. . . . Nature is neither benevolent nor malevolent. Nature simply is."

• Vivificat cautions those who would indulge in eschatalogical speculation:
  The Lord doesn't have to impress his power on us by cutting massive amounts of human life to prove His point. We serve a Bloodied God indeed, the one that shed His Blood on the Cross, not a bloodthirsty one that requires wanton death for propitiation. So, I'm hesitant to tie to this event to His Coming.

  What the earthquake-tsunami portends is clear and more down-to-earth: we need love each other, we need to reach out and fix what's broken and heal the wounded. This natural disaster is not call to retrench into our churches or into our fears: it is a call to Love.

• On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon, and became the occasion for the philosopher Voltaire's rational attack on God and Christianity. Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart revisits Voltair's argument, asking What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?:
  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.

  (Via Amy Welborn).

• A good discussion of Hart's WSJ article going on over at Apologia (with William Luse).