James Wood, Haiti Between God and a Hard Place

[alice wellintown]

Americans just hate intellectuals and can't stand anything but an
American pragmatic solution to the problems we face. This because
Americans still beleive that they are largely responsible for those
problems and are the only nation that can fix them. But this is far
from true anymore. So let the eggheads, many of them like Wood
transpalnts from across the pond where a healthy dose of continental
philosophy is still severd up to a stiff upper lip nostalgia for the
days of empire, preach from their ivory pulpits and get used to
America: it's your new forntier.

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 11:42 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>