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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