I almost laughed out loud when I read the whole “here is the Christian stance” and “here is the Voodoo stance” set up.

Yet, would you agree that this is probably the best MSM report so far?

This is the best so far, but there is a lot of room for improvement. The constant focus on the more morbid aspects of Buddhism is something I never really get. My experience is that Voodou has a lot of rather mundane, everyday practices which seem to be the center of the religion. Yet we read about zombies and sorcery, which must be fairly rare events. Wonder what’s coming next?

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39 “Famines and droughts and floods are common plagues of cities and nations which check the excess of evil. Therefore, just as the physician is a benefactor even if he should cause pain or suffering to the body (for he strives with the disease, and not with the sufferer), so in the same manner God is good Who administers salvation to everyone through the means of particular chastisements. But you, not only do you not speak evilly of the physician who cuts some members, cauterizes others, and excises others again completely from the body, but you even give him money and address him as savior because he confines the disease to a small area before the infirmity can claim the whole body. However, when you see a city crushing its inhabitants in an earthquake, or a ship going down at sea with all hands, you do not shrink from wagging a blasphemous tongue against the true Physician and Savior.” St. Basil the Great, op. cit. 7, 94. “And you may accept the phrase ‘I kill and I will make to live’ (Deut. 32:39) literally, if you wish, since fear edifies the more simple. ‘I will smite and I will heal’ (Deut. 32:39). It is profitable to also understand this phrase literally; for the smiting engenders fear, while the healing incites to love. It is permitted you, nonetheless, to attain to a loftier understanding of the utterance. I will slay through sin and make to live through righteousness. ‘But though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day’ (II Cor. 4:16). Therefore, He does not slay one, and give life to another, but through the means which He slays, He gives life to a man, and He heals a man with that which He smites him, according to the proverb which says, ‘For thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from death’ (Prov. 23:14). So the flesh is chastised for the soul to be healed, and sin is put to death for righteousness to live…. When you hear ‘There shall be no evil in a city which the Lord hath not wrought’ (cf. Amos 3:6), understand by the noun ‘evil’ that the word intimates the tribulation brought upon sinners for the correction of offenses. For Scripture says, ‘For I afflicted thee and straitened thee, to do good to thee’ (cf. Deut. 8:3); so too is evil terminated before it spills out unhindered, as a strong dike or wall holds back a river.

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Robert De Niro plays an evil Spanish slaver of South American Indians who ends up atoning for his misdeeds and defends them. There is also a Spaish Jesuit priest played by Jeremy Irons who goes over to support the Indians, but without taking up arms.

Check it out - it’s still relevant today with Catholic attitudes toward inculturation a big part of the story. Written by Robert Bolt, directed by Roland Joffe, great music by the wonderful Ennio Marricone (#24 on AFI’s list of 100 Years of Film Scores). Aidan Quinn and Liam Neeson are in it, too. “Dances with Wolves” is bland in comparison.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091530/

What a great movie poster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mission_(film)

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Thanks. This really is a case in which I think there are beliefs INSIDE each of the three camps — Catholic, Protestant, Voodoo — that need to be represented in the coverage.

I know that this will take multiple stories or a long piece. But this is a major natural disaster. Sadly, there is time to do that additional work.

dalea:

I almost laughed out loud when I read the whole “here is the Christian stance” and “here is the Voodoo stance” set up.

Yet, would you agree that this is probably the best MSM report so far?

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“The missionaries didn’t threaten [Papa Doc] politically, brought money into the country and eroded the dominance of the Catholic Church he loathed.”

My father, a pastor in a pentecostal denomination visited Haiti in the 1960s to inspect the missions and schools and report back to the denomination. He told me that the reason Papa Doc allowed the denomination to build churches is that it also built free schools and fed the students one meal each day.

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Had it not been for the revolutionary slaves of Haiti, we might well be speaking French in much of what is today the U.S.A.

Napoleon at the height of his power dispatched the greatest military force ever to sail from France. Its mission was twofold: Crush the slave revolt in Haiti, and then proceed up the Mississippi, hem in the expanding 13 Colonies, and reestablish French dominance in a continent that only 30 years before at the Treaty of Paris had become British North America.

Thanks to the Haitian patriots, the French armada never reached New Orleans [and Napoleon decided to sell much of what is now the western U.S. via the Louisiana Purchase.]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100125-haiti-earthquake-voodoo-pat-robertson-pact-devil-wade-davis/

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