The past week brought a total solar eclipse and a magnitude 4.7 earthquake to the northeastern United States (among other places for the eclipse). For the folks who will seize any opportunity to invoke the rapture and possibly God’s judgment on specific subpopulations, it was a convergence too delicious to pass up. This in turn could not be overlooked by the folks who love to trot out a science fact. Don’t you know that eclipses and earthquakes have natural causes, and that the eclipse has been predictable for decades? Now, while I’m inclined to agree that ascribing guilt for natural events is dicey, and I am well aware that many predictions of the rapture have come and gone unfilled (including any associated with this eclipse), I also think invoking plate tectonics and celestial mechanics rather misses the point.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: So When is an Eclipse not Just an Eclipse?
Earthquake
A few minutes with Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter”
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
— John Updike. Seven Stanzas at Easter. 1960. Accessed at http://www.iserv.net/~stpats/Updike.htm (4/21/2011).
While reading Kent Annan‘s After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken (InterVarsity Press. 2011), I came across selections from John Updike’s Seven Stanzas at Easter. On Easter, as he wrestles with faith in the face of “scientific modernity’s assault on faith in the resurrection,” Kent appreciates reading Seven Stanzas at Easter:
I can identify with these doubts, but he [Updike] asserts they shouldn’t embarrass us into unbelief. The stanzas of the poem articulate the kind of faith I need in response to Haiti, where so many died (by comparison, a similar-intensity earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994 killed only seventy-two people) largely because they had been left behind by poverty by the modern world. [Read more…] about A few minutes with Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter”
‘After Shock’ as a resource for wrestling with the crisis in Japan
How long will you hide your face from me?
— Psalm 13:1
How does one Search for (and embrace) Honest Faith when
- your world is shaken?
- you’ve watched the world of others being shaken?
- you serve, minister to, walk with those whose world has been shaken?
- colleagues, family, friends bring the challenging question of where was your God?
At Jubilee 2011, I had the opportunity hear Kent Annan (author of After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken and codirector of Haiti Partners) and Enel Angervil (Haitian co-worker with Haiti Partners) share about their journey with God in Haiti.
Below’s a video drawn from Kent’s Annotated Wish List (After Shock. InterVarsity Press. 39). Take a few minutes to prayerfully consider/wrestle with it. Maybe watch it more than once as part of your Lenten devotions.
Breathe.
Then take a few minutes to read Enel’s story about surviving the collapse of his University classroom building. Be challenged by and rejoice with me in Enel’s call to serve God in faith with hope (in God) in the midst of crisis. Pray for Enel (& Kent’s) continued renewal, strength and perseverance in their work in Haiti as it no longer receives front page attention.
In my next post, I’ll share from Kent Annan’s After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken, but for today, let’s … [Read more…] about ‘After Shock’ as a resource for wrestling with the crisis in Japan