Paganism
A Shinto Response to Tragedy, One Year Later
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This Sunday, March 11th, will be the one year anniversary of a massive earthquake and tsunami that brought death, destruction, and nuclear chaos to Japan. A tragedy that the island nation is still trying to recover from. A few days after the disaster began, I explored the religious angle to stories of Japanese citizens dealing with tragedy, and how Western journalists seemed uncertain of how to talk about the spiritual dimensions outside of a Christian context. “As things progress, we can hope that a larger sense of the importance of ancestor worship, tradition, the divine within nature, and the multiplicity of spiritual beings within Japanese culture will shine through in future aftermath coverage. In this disaster there is a rare opportunity to understand how a culture outside the Christian context grapples with universal questions and problems. Religion journalists should rise to this occasion, and minority faiths in the West should ask for the true diversity of faith in our world be accurately and fairly covered.”