Abstract
This first book of an award-winning journalist pursues the explicitly theological question announced in the title. Motivated by the tsunami of December 2004 and the experience of hurricane Katrina the following year, the bulk of the volume - nine of the eleven chapters - is devoted to representing the spectrum of theological and religious views regarding what philosophers call "natural evil" in Judaism, Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, Evangelicalism, African-American Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and what Stern calls "The Nonbeliever's Perspective," which includes secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists. (The justification provided for having four chapters on Christian traditions is that the book is intended for the North American audience.) In each of these chapters, Stern presents in narrative form his findings derived from interviews with at least three representatives - scholars, intellectuals, and other leaders - of the tradition under consideration (forty-three in all, for whom a bibliography of their works would have been helpful). He adequately summarizes their responses, often transcribing, sometimes in fairly lengthy sections, their own words.