Shaken faith

Indonesia: Amid a string of disasters and growing fear of Allah’s judgment, Christian ministries are extending mercy | Mark Bergin

Minutes before 6 a.m. on Saturday, May 27, Indonesia's unsettled landscape shook with devastating force one more time. A 6.3-magnitude earthquake ravaged the Bantul district on the densely populated island of Java, killing almost 5,000 people and toppling the homes of roughly 200,000 more.

Amid such horror, many survivors wondered at the religious significance of the disaster—the fifth grand-scale calamity to befall the world's largest Muslim nation in the past 18 months. Some questioned whether they had angered Allah. Others declared unequivocally that such rampant human suffering signaled divine judgment.

Whatever the competing interpretations of Islamic theology, the Java tremor followed a string of seismic terror dating to December 2004, when an earthquake-powered tsunami left 230,000 dead throughout Southeast Asia. Though smaller in scale, this latest natural catastrophe wields no shortage of similar pain and tragedy.