“He Has a Reason”: How Natural Disasters Test the Faithful
NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports, “In churches across Houston on Sunday, pastors struggled to tell their parishioners why a God they believed to be good might have allowed a storm of Biblical proportion to flood their city.” Gjelten writes, “The dilemma is so serious that theologians actually have a term for efforts to explain why God and evil can coexist: theodicy.” Some argue that God is not responsible for human hardship, some claim that suffering is God’s punishment, while others say that disasters allow God to strengthen peoples’ faith.