[JSRNC 6.

1 (2012) 56-70] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1749-4907

doi: 10.1558/jsmc.v6il.56 JSRNC (online) ISSN 1749-4915

Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons:

Nazianzus and New Orleans

Anna Duke, Brenda Llew ellyn Ihssen, and Kevin J. O'Brien

Department of Religion,
Pacific Lutheran University,
Tacoma, WA 98447, USA
dukeag@plu.edu; ihssenbl@plu.edu; obrien@plu.edu

Abstract
In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus argued that cattle plague,
drought, hailstorms, and crop loss in Nazianzus were caused by the
unrighteous activity of the city's residents. In 2005, evangelical leader Pat
Robertson raised the possibility that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina was
a direct result of the fact that ‫׳‬we have killed over 40 million unborn babies
in America‫׳‬. One year later, African American humanist Anthony Pinn
wrote that the aftermath of Katrina was a moral indictment of the oppres-
sive structures inherent in U.S. society. Though separated by time and
ideology, these three claims share the assumption that religious and moral
lessons can be learned from natural disasters. We analyze these responses
in order to demonstrate how religious interpretations of disasters can
move from a common assumption to widely diverse moral arguments, and
to urge that scholars provide more historical and theological context when
analyzing religious claims about natural disasters.

Keywords
natural disaster, theological reflection, Pat Robertson, Gregory Nazianzus,
Anthony Pinn, Hurricane Katrina

Introduction

In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Christian

televangelist Pat Robertson claimed that the tragedy was God's retribu-
tion for a 'pact with the devil' Haitians had signed. This claim was

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 Duke, Ihssen, and O'Brien Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons 57

reminiscent of Robertson's suggestion, five years earlier, that the devas-

tation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution for
the shedding of 'innocent blood' caused by legalized abortion in the
United States (Cnn.com 2010). Many who hear Robertson's comments
have sought to distance themselves by critiquing his basic assumption
that theological meaning can be drawn from a natural disaster. The
historian Ted Steinberg, for example, dismissed any attribution of
Katrina to God as 'moral handwashing', instead urging careful attention
to the failed levees of New Orleans and the transportation system that
left so many unable to evacuate the city (Cooperman 2005). After Katrina,
Steinberg updated his history of natural disaster in America, Acts of God,
concluding that 'to implicate God or nature in these disasters is to
rationalize the economic oppression that explains why some people can
flee impending calamity and others cannot, why some people have
adequate housing and others do not, why some live and some die'. This
fits Steinberg's broadest thesis, which is that the implications of disasters
must be understood as economic and political phenomena, and that
employing 'God-fearing language' is 'little more than a convenient
evasion' of responsibility (Steinberg 2006:211, xxv).
Steinberg exemplifies a trend in the literature on religion and disasters,
a frequent suggestion or implication that attributing a disaster to God
precludes sophisticated moral analysis (see especially Gaillard and
Texier 2010 and Merli 2010). This trend treats appeals to God as too
singular and too simplistic. We will argue against this trend, demon-
strating that (1) theological reflection on disaster is not limited to any
one theological or social agenda and so cannot be dismissed as 'moral
handwashing', and (2) contemporary theological responses to natural
disaster can be better understood in the context of historical tradition.
Our argument is based on an analysis of three authors' responses to
natural disasters: Pat Robertson, Anthony Pinn, and Gregory Nazianzus.
Since the national syndication of the Christian television program The
700 Club in 1974, Robertson has been a prominent and influential evan-
gelical leader and media figure promoting a conservative social and
theological agenda in all his public statements. Anthony Pinn is a
contemporary African American scholar who identifies his work as
theological humanism, and whose response to Hurricane Katrina
emphasized the oppressive structures that caused some to suffer
its effects far more than others.1 Finally, Gregory Nazianzus is a

1. Pinn defines his work as 'African American Humanism‫׳‬, and draws from a
non-theistic tradition within the African diaspora. However, he continues to refer to
his project as 'theology'. See especially Pinn 2004.

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58 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

fourth-century Cappadocian bishop and one of the most influential

theologians of the patristic period, probably best known for his contribu-
tions to the construction of Christian theological thought regarding the
Holy Trinity. Gregory consistently responded theologically to the
disasters and human suffering of his time.
Two cautions are in order: first, reading a patristic theologian like
Gregory in dialogue with contemporary authors brings challenges,
because the cultural frameworks are quite different. The Cappadocian
bishops lived in a world completely different from ours with respect to
economics, politics, and status; they owned slaves, operated under a
patronage model, and within an ‫׳‬honor/shame‫ ׳‬system. Further, the
eschatological vision of the patristics led to a belief that the injustices of
this world would be resolved by restoration within Christ, not through
human work (see Holman 2000; Daley 2002; and Allen 2011).2Our use of
Gregory's thought must be understood as an attempt to learn what is
possible from the distant past, with full awareness that not all that he
taught can or should translate to the present. A second caution relates to
the contemporary conversation partners consulted in this essay: an
evangelical television personality and an African American humanist.
While we are closer in time to these men, it is nevertheless important to
be clear that we as authors come from social locations very different
from those of Pat Robertson and Anthony Pinn, and this limits how well
we can speak for them. We are not evangelical theologians, and so we
attempt to make sense of Robertson's thought as outsiders to his
discourse. The same is true of our relationship to Pinn, and we are
particularly conscious that his work is informed and defined by his
identity and experience as an African American. We do not claim to be
qualified to critique these perspectives internally, nor to understand fully
the experience or argument of either man. Nevertheless, despite gulfs
created by divergent social locations and sixteen centuries, we believe it
is worthwhile to engage in a critical dialogue with these three figures.3

2. Because of this theological background, many patristic sermons state that the
poor exist at least in part for the purpose of the salvation of the rich, a notion
uncomfortable to contemporary sensibilities. See Grig 2006. The ways the ‫׳‬poor' are
depicted in ancient texts varies widely. Analysis of Augustine's methods is found in
Finn 2006; conversely, one finds a different way of portraying the poor in the Cappa-
docians, including Gregory Nazianzen, as seen in De Vienne 1995 and Holman 2001.
3. We understand our project as complimentary to that of David Chester, who
has contributed to the study of religion and disasters by making generalizations about
the differences caused by historical location (Chester 1998,2005; Chester and Agnus
2010). In like fashion, our project creates a conversation between three different
thinkers in order to shed light on the ways in which they have undertaken the

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 Duke, Ihssen, and O'Brien Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons 59

New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina

Founded in 1718 by French settlers on the banks of the Mississippi, the
city of New Orleans quickly became a thriving port city and a vital part
of the U.S. economy as a key transit point for textiles, livestock, liquor,
and slaves. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, it was the largest city
in Louisiana. Before 2005, the 'Big Easy‫( ׳‬the city's nickname) was
primarily present in the national consciousness as a city for tourists, a
place to ' laissez les bontemps rouler', a popular convention and Spring
Break destination, and the site of a world-famous Mardi Gras celebra-
tion. By the end of the twentieth century, tourism was the city's domi-
nant industry, and most non-residents associated the city exclusively
with its European heritage, especially as reflected in the French Quarter
(Thomas 2008:256).
Other aspects of New Orleans's history and present reality were less
widely known. From the early eighteenth century, the city had been a
key port for the slave trade and a metropolitan center of the slave-
holding South. It was also a popular settling point for free blacks, some
of whom had been freed on American soil but many of whom immi-
grated from places like Haiti (Johnson 1999; Pamphile 2001). From its
earliest origins, New Orleans was therefore both a site of racist oppres-
sion and a place where African Americans began to build lives for
themselves. Due to this history, the city before Katrina was a classic case
study in racial politics, as whites fled to suburbs in the 1950s and left
behind an underfunded city with high rates of poverty and a population
that was 68% African American. There were also clear cases of environ-
mental racism in which the disproportionate burden of environmental
degradation and deprivation of environmental benefits were inflicted
upon poor and marginalized persons. Perhaps the quintessential demon-
stration of this phenomenon was the construction of two New Orleans
subdivisions of subsidized housing—Gordon Plaza and Press Park—on
a site that had previously been a municipal landfill.
Still another vital aspect of New Orleans's history is the engineering
that has always been necessary to keep it dry. Parts of the city lie as
many as six feet below sea level, and are therefore particularly vulnerable
to flooding. In 1727, New Orleans's early French settlers built artificial
levees eighteen feet wide and three feet high in order to augment the
natural riverbanks and restrict the Mississippi to its channel. For the next

common task of drawing moral lessons from natural disasters; roots shared by Pinn,
Robertson, and Gregory in the Christian tradition seem sufficient common ground to
begin such a conversation.

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60 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

two hundred years, engineers kept building higher and wider levees. By
1890, workers had built levees up to ten feet across at the crown and even
wider at the base, and engineers were beginning work on a network of
huge canals and enormous pumps that would drain the city of its
frequent rains. This system continued through the twentieth century and
into the twenty-first. Unfortunately, these canals and pumps created
higher floodwaters and dried up many of the wetlands that had histori-
cally absorbed water from rain and flooding (Kelman 2007).
The European, African American, and environmental histories of New
Orleans are essential in order to understand what happened when
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on August 29,2005.
The most destructive hurricane in U.S. history, Katrina killed over 1,800
people and caused over $70 billion of insured damage (Bullard 2008:
753). While the majority of New Orleans residents followed evacuation
orders and were safely away when the storm hit, a significant minority
remained, most because they had no other option: they were dependent
on public transportation, which proved to be entirely inadequate. Later
investigations revealed that the city had access to only one quarter of the
buses necessary for a full evacuation of these residents and that there
was no plan for such an evacuation. Thus, 40,000 people took refuge in
the city's massive enclosed stadium, the Superdome, and another 20‫־־‬
30,000 in the city's convention center (Bullard 2008: 756; Sanyika 2009:
87,92).
As anthropologist Craig Colten writes, Hurricane Katrina was a
natural disaster, a 'biophysical event' that was 'blind to color and class'.
However, the impacts of this event were heavily influenced by social
vulnerability, which largely determined who suffered severe negative
consequences (Colten 2006: 733). The flooding of New Orleans was not
the immediate result of the hurricane, but occurred after levees and
floodwalls broke. The worst flooding took place in the predominantly
black and poor Lower Ninth Ward.4This raised suspicions that there was
a racist distribution of risk in the city. These suspicions were heightened

4. This reminded many suspicious African American residents of earlier floods.

Whites have tended to occupy the highest and best land, protected by natural levees.
In contrast, the Lower Ninth Ward—with a population that is 98% African American
and 30% below the poverty line—is well below sea level. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy, the
most destructive hurricane to strike the coast before Katrina, caused severe flooding
and deaths in the Lower Ninth Ward. While official histories report that the levee
broke from the rising waters, a popular account among African Americans in the city
suggests that the city's white mayor ordered the levees to be breached and water to be
pumped out of his own, majority-white neighborhood and into the Lower Ninth
Ward (Bullard 2008: 760-63).

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 Duke, Ihssen, and O'Brien Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons 61

by a meeting shortly after the storm in which business leaders consid-

ered a plan to better defend New Orleans against future storms by
'converting the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East to flood
protection zones or green spaces' (Sanyika 2009:94). Many critics have
also perceived racism and injustice in the ways the city has been rebuilt
and the manner in which some citizens have been supported in their
return to the city while others have not.5

A White Evangelical Responds to Natural Disaster

After the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, many media reports focused on
the responses of those conservative Christian evangelicals who empha-
sized that the storm hit 'the Big Easy'. These responses tended to ignore
the charged racial dynamics of the city and the fact that the tragedy was
as much due to human negligence—whether the negligence of engineers
who failed to build proper levees or the negligence of those who built a
city below sea level—as it was to 'natural' forces. After contending that
all hurricanes are caused by God because God 'controls the heavens', for
example, evangelical leader John Hagee asserted that New Orleans's
tourist attractions brought God's wrath down upon the city, citing
especially the Southern Decadence Festival, which takes place every
Labor Day weekend and is more widely known as 'Gay Mardi Gras'
(Huffington Post 2008).
Perhaps the most infamous conservative evangelical response was the
comment quoted above, when Pat Robertson suggested that Hurricane
Katrina was God's retribution for abortion. In an indirect allusion to
flooding in New Orleans, he lamented the 'wholesale slaughter of
innocent children' immediately before describing a biblical story in
which God caused the land to 'vomit out' those who shed innocent
blood (Media Matters 2010).
While Robertson's comment was greeted with astonishment and even
derision by many, it was consistent with his theology and social views.
When Robertson asked—almost certainly rhetorically—whether Hurri-
cane Katrina was linked to abortion, he was implying an argument
consistent with many he has made explicitly before. Informed by his
conception of God as completely omnipotent and exercising total control
over the world's natural forces, Robertson's interpretation of natural
disasters has long been that they are divine punishment for human sin

5. A year after the storm, 'The white population...was about two-thirds of its
former size, while the black population was down by nearly three-quarters' (Logan
2009:249)

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62 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

(1984: 41-43). In addition, because Robertson's view of sin focuses on

individual rather than collective responsibility, he assumes that those
who suffer in a disaster are, for the most part, those whose sin caused it
(see Robertson 1977: 45-50; 2009). Furthermore, he believes that by
emphasizing that victims deserve their suffering, he can motivate them
to repent and purify their lives (Robertson n.d.). Thus, Robertson believes
natural disasters can be 'spiritually beneficial', as he demonstrated when
he stated that he was optimistic that 'something good may come' out of
the tragedy of the Haiti quake in the form of a 'great turning to God' in
that country.

An African American Liberationist Responds to Natural Disaster

In sharp contrast to Robertson, many African American religious thinkers
who responded to Hurricane Katrina described antediluvian New
Orleans primarily as a site of racist and economic oppression where
human engineering failed. For example, Christian ethicist Darryl M.
Trimiew emphasized that Katrina can only be understood in light of the
racism, poverty, and environmental degradation that have long charac-
terized New Orleans. He particularly noted that Louisiana environmen-
talists have long advocated additional preservation of wetlands precisely
to minimize flooding, but have been drowned out by politicians who
allow corporations to 'build more condominiums and dig more oil wells'
(Trimiew 2006:184-86).
One of the most developed responses to Hurricane Katrina is that of
Anthony Pinn, an African American religious thinker who has written
extensively about suffering and evil. Pinn agreed with Trimiew that the
New Orleans' disaster should be seen predominantly as the work of
human beings. He emphasized that hurricanes are indiscriminant natu-
ral phenomena, and concluded that the disproportionate suffering of
African Americans on the gulf coast can only be explained by the racist,
oppressive structures of U.S. and Louisiana society (Pinn 2006:101-4).
Pinn also argued explicitly against attempts to use Katrina to ponder
Christian theodicy, suggesting that attempts to explain God's justice
distract attention from human responsibility and too easily allow a claim
that suffering will be redemptive (quoted in Stern 2007:128).
Identifying his response as humanistic rather than Christian, Pinn
urged his readers to attend to human rather than divine justice, insisting
that 'ecological and social ethics trump theodicy as a tool of analysis',
and that natural disasters should be understood as a way to 'lay bare the
structures of injustice and discrimination that define the formation of life
options'. Yet Pinn's response was distinctively theological, as when he

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 Duke, Ihssen, and O'Brien Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons 63

argued that responses like Robertson's are 'marked by theological distor-

tion, manipulation through which the challenge of ambiguity in scrip-
ture is forgotten and the dilemma of interpretation is ignored: God
makes it rain on the just and unjust, or so scripture says' (2006:100-101).6
The appropriate way to think about Katrina, he argued, is with outrage
at the racist and oppressive structures causing human suffering.7
The lesson Pinn drew from Hurricane Katrina is consistent with his
theological and social views. His insistence that the story of Katrina is
about the failures of social structures and the need for African Ameri-
cans to define and shape their own experience is an expression of the
'humanist theology' he has developed within liberationist thought (Pinn
2004). His refusal to turn to a divine explanation for the hurricane is
consistent with previous work in which he has argued that portraying
suffering as salvific diminishes the value of the oppressed and decreases
the urgency oppressors may feel about changing oppressive ways.
The suffering of African Americans under racist social structures is
'unredeemably evil' and 'existentially damaging', Pinn has maintained,
and the lessons to be learned from such suffering are not primarily about
the nature of God, but are about the destructive power of human sin in
racist societies (Pinn 1995:10-11,89,140-41,157).

A Cappadocian Responds to Natural Disaster

The fourth-century thinker Gregory 'the Theologian' (c. 329-c. 390)
provides an interesting contrast to the divergent ways Robertson and
Pinn wrestle with nature-related calamity. Gregory was bom in southern
Cappadocia into an aristocratic, landowning family in Arianzum. Edu-
cated in Athens, in the fertile intellectual tension between Neo-Platonist
philosophy and the Christian narrative, Gregory developed a sophisti-
cated rhetorical and theological perspective (Daley 2002:7-8; McGuckin
2001: 85). Drawing on both Platonic and Aristotelian sources, Gregory
argued that human beings should respond to the needs of others out of
an appreciation for their shared human nature. Gregory adopted Basil
the Great's model of Christian morality, which paid attention to the

6. In this quotation, Pinn is responding not to Robertson but to Michael

Marcavage, who explained Katrina by writing that 'this act of God destroyed a
wicked city.. .a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin‫׳‬.
7. Pinn's argument seems to have affinity with Ted Steinberg's view that appeals
to God are 'moral handwashing', but as a scholar of religion and a self-identified
humanist theologian, his work also contradicts the assumption Steinberg seems to
make that all religious or theological interpretations preclude social analysis.

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64 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

bodies and souls of the undeserving poor.8In a climate where Graeco-

roman conceptions of honor, shame, and status still conditioned the way
the business of empire was done, Gregory prioritized those whose
diseased bodies were starved for food and health, and whose souls were
starved for salvation (Winslow 1965: 348).
Beyond its association with Gregory, the history of the city of
Nazianzus is little known. Worthy of mention—but not description—by
Ptolemy and Pliny, it was subordinate to the larger city of Caesarea,
which was situated at the convergence of nearly all major roads through
Asia Minor (Smith 2006: 469). A territory ripe with potential, it was
strategically important to the Empire primarily because these roads
allowed for the movement of trade and the transportation of troops—not
unlike New Orleans. Also like New Orleans, Nazianzus was susceptible
to disasters that could quickly shift a sizeable number of residents from
merely poor to severely impoverished. Seismic disturbances, the com-
mandeering of foodstuffs by traveling imperial troops, and the failure of
crops were common (Foss 1977: 82). Despite the roads, Cappadocian
terrain and weather prevented substantial relief from reaching people in
cities during times of famine, a fact that remained true into the nine-
teenth century (Barrows 1884: 307-9).
The occasion for Gregory's Oration 16 was a series of natural disasters
and the subsequent neglect of victims. In 373, the city of Nazianzus
experienced a cattle plague, drought, and violent hail that destroyed
crops and livestock, bringing financial ruin, and physical, emotional, and
spiritual distress to a community that was already characterized by
economic injustice through latifundia and usury.9According to Gregory,
the poor were already oppressed by the failures of the rich to tithe and
give alms (Beeley 2008:15-16; Gregory, Oration 16:18). The citizens of
Nazianzus had neither money nor goods to pay taxes, and did not react
kindly when the government sent unsympathetic tax collectors in
defiance of appeals for clemency. Threatened by Roman authorities with
physical retaliation, the Nazianzens rushed in a panic to the Church and

8. See Gregory, Oration 14 and Oration 43; McGuckin 2001:151; Sterk 2004:126;
Daley 1999; Bernardi 1968:400-402.
9. Latifundia is a process whereby large estates consume small farms around
them, and landowners incorporate smaller farms into theirs. See Gonzalez 1990:29-33.
Greek and Roman systems allowed for usury (interest on a loan), and alarms were
only sounded when interest exceeded legal limits. Following in the footsteps of Jewish
economic theory and the economic theology of Philo of Alexandria, usury is soundly
condemned by early Christian authors; for them, any interest on a loan constitutes
‫׳‬usury‫׳‬, and though it is understood as legal, it is considered immoral (Ihssen 2011:
158).

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 Duke, Ihssen, and O'Brien Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons 65

demanded patronage from their Bishop, Gregory the Elder (Gregory's

Father), whose silence in the face of social chaos only added to the
communal grief (Ad cives Nazianzenos, Oration 17 and Oration 16).
In contrast to his father, Gregory the Younger spoke directly to the
distraught and suffering people of Nazianzus. Interestingly, his primary
subjects in this oration were the wealthy and privileged, whose sinful
actions—he claimed—were not only responsible for the suffering of the
impoverished, but also the cause of the catastrophes which had befallen
their city. Gregory developed a clear theodicy, attributing the disasters
to God and rhetorically portraying them as God's 'gentle' and 'fatherly'
reproofs of the rich for their persecution of the poor (Oration 16:249-53).
In an effort to comfort the people, Gregory argued that God's intention
in bringing about these natural disasters was to save rather than destroy
the souls of the prosperous citizens of Nazianzus by leading them
towards repentance and guiding them towards a life of active concern
for the needy (Oration 16: 252,254).
Drawing on scripture, Gregory argued that God was merciful to the
Nazianzens despite the series of natural disasters in their city. He noted
that God had spared the residents of less 'gentle' chastisements, such as
the swarms of frogs, lice, and locusts, which had tormented the Egyp-
tians in the book of Exodus (Oration 16: 250). In addition, Gregory
addressed the spiritual needs of the 'righteous'—the poor victims of the
natural disasters which befell Nazianzus—by advising them to patiently
bear and 'rise superior' to their apparently unmerited affliction. Their
suffering was redemptive and would serve to purify their sinful natures
(Oration 16: 249,252).
Gregory also used the disasters as an occasion with which to condemn
the wealthy as worshippers of 'gold and silver' who pursued their own
self-aggrandizement by increasing the poverty of the rural population
and by withholding surpluses of food from the destitute. To those who
claimed prosperity as evidence of God's blessing and the agony of the
suffering as evidence of God's displeasure, Gregory responded that any
who truly believed that their possessions came from God would share
their wealth with the unfortunate (Gregory, Oration 14: 62-63,67-70).

Analyzing the Responses to Natural Disasters

At first glance, the statements made in Gregory's Oration 16 seem to have
much in common with the approach of Robertson, who suggested that
Hurricane Katrina was sent from God as a punishment for sinful actions.
However, in contrast to Robertson, who excluded himself from the
'sinners' he blamed for the natural disasters, Gregory repeatedly used

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66 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

the inclusive pronouns 'us' and ‫׳‬our‫ ׳‬in Oration 16's descriptions of the
unjust and oppressive actions of Nazianzus's privileged residents.
Gregory, a privileged aristocrat, viewed himself as a member of the elite
community responsible for oppressing the poor and thereby motivating
God to punish the city of Nazianzus (Oration 16: 252-54). In further
contrast to Robertson, who seems to have assumed that God would only
strike the guilty, Gregory believed that the wealthy and well fed could
be taught a lesson through the suffering of the poor. According to
Gregory, poverty and misfortune did not reflect on the poor themselves
but rather on the wealthy, because poverty occurs when those with more
material wealth are 'bad stewards' and do not share the resources which
they received from God with the poor (Oration 14: 57). Thus, while
Robertson claimed that it was the poor victims of the Haiti quake who
needed a 'great turning to God', Gregory argued that it was he and other
privileged citizens of Nazianzus who should respond with repentance to
the natural disasters striking their city and afflicting the poor.
It appears, then, that Gregory and Anthony Pinn have more in
common when drawing moral lessons about oppressive structures and
the sins of the wealthy from natural disaster. Gregory did not go as far as
Pinn, however, in attributing the suffering after a disaster solely to
human action. Instead, Gregory consistently taught that every motion in
the universe—including every earthquake and hurricane—is directed by
the reason and order of God.10While Gregory did not believe that he
could trace a clear moral lesson in every instance of affliction, he asserted
that no one should ever doubt God's control of the heavens in any
circumstance (Oration 14:63,66; Oration 16:248). Also unlike Pinn, who
rejected the notion of redemptive suffering, Gregory contended that all
humans, including the poor, could benefit from the spiritually purifying
and liberating effects of suffering (see Alfeyev 2003:71,79-83). Gregory
therefore presents an interesting conversation partner to both Robertson
and Pinn: He demonstrates that moral and social critique can coexist
with belief in 'acts of God' in nature, that to place responsibility for
nature-related calamities in God's hands does not necessarily abrogate
personal responsibility.

10. It is worth noting that Gregory would have consciously understood this as a
theological claim rather than a scientific one. Patristic theologians were largely
classically trained and educated in the traditional liberal arts, including the study of
naturalistic explanations for disasters. The writings of the Greek patristics demon-
strate a thorough facility with and appreciation for reason as a primary means by
which one might encounter what is real and true. Gregory's emphasis on God's action
therefore reflects a theological choice.

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 Duke, Ihssen, and O'Brien Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons 67

Conclusion
In March 2011 a horrifie earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, causing
thousands of deaths, massive destruction, and meltdowns at a complex
of nuclear reactors. Within days, Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of
Tokyo, explained the events as 'punishment from heaven' for the greed
of the Japanese people (Alabaster and Pitman 2011). While Ishihara
appealed to a very different tradition, his effort to draw religious and
moral lessons from disaster resembles that of the authors we have been
analyzing. While some commentators and critics may believe that the
public should be secular or 'rational' enough to leave such explanations
behind, evidence suggests that religious reflection is a perennial response
to natural disasters, is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, and deserves
continued scholarly scrutiny."
Discourse in the United States after Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian
earthquake demonstrates that the public will benefit from such scrutiny.
The most common public rebuttals to Pat Robertson's inflammatory
comments were dismissals of his premise, arguments that religious
interpretations of natural disasters are inappropriate. The examples of
Pinn and Gregory complicate such facile dismissals by demonstrating
that diverse religious interpretations of disaster are possible, and so it is
the content of such interpretations that matters. Our analyses of these
authors demonstrate that religious people do not have a single or
simplistic response to natural disasters, and that appeals to 'God' or
'heaven' do not preclude further discussion. To the contrary, appeals to
religion are the occasion for social and ethical analysis.
Scholars of religion should understand religious interpretations of
natural disasters as expressions of long and diverse traditions. The
authors discussed in this paper represent two distinct time periods and
three distinct social locations, but it will be valuable in future work to
expand the comparison to include additional examples. In doing so, the
questions developed in this paper will be useful. Scholars should ask
where religious interpreters direct their moral lessons: at the victims of a
disaster, as in Robertson's case, or at the bystanders, as Pinn and Gregory
would have it. It will also be important to ask whether consideration of
the divine or the sacred in a disaster is a distraction from the key issues,
as Pinn would have it, or the most central question of all, as Robertson
and Gregory taught. These two questions should continue to be asked of
religious responses to natural disasters: Where is the blame placed? And,
how does moral and social critique draw upon and relate to the sacred?

11. For a psychological explanation of this perennial phenomenon, see Grandjean

et al. 2008.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.

68 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

In a world shaped by climate change and intensifying environmental

degradation, the line between 'natural' and anthropogenic disasters will
be harder than ever to adjudicate, and the study of how people interpret
catastrophic events will become even more complicated. Scholars of
religion will need to ask clear questions, draw on diverse examples, and
attend to the nuances of how religious people make sense of disasters.

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