James Wood, Haiti Between God and a Hard Place

[rich]

i'm sure the people of Haiti will be enthused that such bright minds
are thinking about them

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 9:04 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 23 January 2010, Boston,  reprinted in NY Times Op-Ed 24 January 2010
>
> Wood's binary here is one of the most important ideas in Pynchon's
> fiction, indeed, it is one of the most important ideas in American
> Fiction: the Puritan vs. Deistic God in the Americas.
>
> Between God and a Hard Place
>
>
> Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are,
> at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect
> on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the
> reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate
> appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is
> punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as
> nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama
> view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power
> over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power,
> supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely
> suffering decisively suggests the second.
>
> James Wood, the author of the novel “The Book Against God,” is a staff
> writer at The New Yorker.
>