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Learning from scholars and every day Americans about what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion, helping all of us better comprehend and perpetuate the American experiment in self-government, including what is perhaps its greatest innovation and the essence of the American project: religious freedom as defined by the Constitution’s Article VI and First Amendment religion clauses.
Episodes
Monday Oct 19, 2020
Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather
Monday Oct 19, 2020
Monday Oct 19, 2020
2020 has brought America the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest wildfire season in California history, according to the California officials, and so many hurricanes that we have had to start using Greek letters to identify them. These things have traumatized Americans and America itself.
When Americans have experienced trauma, they have often reached out to religion hoping for some emotional comfort, physical assistance and answers to help them understand the sometimes chaotic and destructive world that surrounds them.
Peter Thuesen just published what is, for these reasons, a very timely book called Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, which, and I’m quoting here from the book cover flap, "captures the harrowing drama of tornadoes, as clergy, theologians, meteorologists, and ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of these death-dealing tempests. Mr. Thuesen says something that all Americans should listen to: ‘in the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar and religiously primal.... In the whirlwind, Americans confront the question of their own destiny’...."
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