As Forças das Nações Unidas, os Capacetes Azuis da ONU, redobram a assistência ao Haiti, ao se despedirem de 70 dos seus colaboradores, incluindo o Embaixador Hédi Annabi, da Tunisia, e o seu Adjunto Luiz Carlos da Costa, do Brasil que morreram no terramoto de 12-Janeiro-2010 em Port-au-Prince.Foi criado um Luiz da Costa Memorial Fund para contribuições a favor das missões de emergência e de paz.
MINUSTAH, a Missão das Nações Unidas para a estabilização no Haiti, é coordenada por militares brasileiros sob o comando do General Floriano Peixoto.
VER UN Peacekeeping in Haiti desde Junho 2004, VerdeOliva , RTP
Teachers Without Borders (Professores sem Fronteiras) partilham o seu "Earthquake Curriculum" on-line, conteúdos escolares sobre os tremores de terra, em 6 lições:
Lição 1: Interior da Terra e Placas Tectónicas
Lição 2: Descobrindo Fronteiras Tectónicas
Lição 3: Propriedades dos Materiais da Terra
Lição 4: Movimentos e Falhas Tectónicos
Lição 5: Máquina do Terremoto
Lição 6: Ondas Sísmicas
Teachers Without Borders for Haiti
Between God and a Hard Place
ResponderEliminarhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24wood.html
In the 18th century, the genre of “earthquake sermon” was good business. ...
Five years later, when LISBON was all but demolished by an enormous earthquake, the unholy refrain was heard again — one preacher even argued that the people of Lisbon had been relatively fortunate, for God had spared more people than he had killed. It was the Lisbon earthquake that prompted Voltaire to attack Leibniz’s metaphysical optimism, in which all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Theodicy, which is the justification of God’s good government of the world in the face of evil and pain, was suddenly harder to practice. But the preachers kept at it. “There is no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake,” wrote the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, in 1777.
...
The president was merely uttering an idiomatic version of the kind of thing you hear from survivors whenever a disaster strikes: “God must have been watching out for me; it’s a miracle I survived,” whereby those who died were presumably not being “watched out for.” ...
...Besides, to talk of luck, or fortune, in the face of a disaster seems flippant, and belittling to those who have been savaged by such bad luck. A toothache is bad luck; an earthquake is somehow theological.
The only people who would seem to have the right to invoke God at the moment are the Haitians themselves, who beseech his help amidst dreadful pain. They, too, alas, appear to wander the wasteland of theodicy. News reports have described some Haitians giving voice to a worldview uncomfortably close to Pat Robertson’s, in which a vengeful God has been meting out justified retribution: “I blame man. God gave us nature, and we Haitians, and our governments, abused the land. You cannot get away without consequences,” one man told The Times last week.
Others sound like a more frankly theological President Obama: a 27-year-old survivor, Mondésir Raymone, was quoted thus: “We have survived by the grace of God.” Bishop Éric Toussaint, standing near his damaged cathedral, said something similar: “Why give thanks to God? Because we are here. What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.”
A survivor’s gratitude is combined with theological fatalism. This response is entirely understandable, uttered in a ruined landscape beyond the experience of most of us, and a likely source of pastoral comfort to the bishop’s desperate flock. But that should not obscure the fact that it is little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.
Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.
James Wood, the author of the novel “The Book Against God,” is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
O grande terramoto, tsunami e incêndio de Lisboa de 1755 foi objecto de diversas interpretações teológicas:
ResponderEliminar"Thomas Prentice (1702-1782), por exemplo, graduado de Harvard e pastor congregacional em 1774, foi um dos vários escritores de seu tempo que após o terremoto de Lisboa em 1755, “deu ênfase a ele como um sinal dos tempos”. Em seu sermão Observations...on The Late terrible Night of Eartquake, publicado em 01/01/1756, dois meses após o terremoto, Prentice baseou-se “na premissa do terremoto [de 1755] como um sinal da aproximação do fim da Era; o clímax seria quando Deus se levantaria para abalar terrivelmente os céus e a terra” e Ap 6:12-17 teria seu completo cumprimento."
Uma apresentação interessante sobre o
ResponderEliminarTerramoto de Lisboa de 1755, que foi seguido de maremoto e incêndio
http://www.slideshare.net/cattonia/absolutismo-5446577
Gabriel Malagrida veio a Lisboa em 1750 e tendo aí assistido aos últimos momentos da vida do rei D. João V, tendo permanecido nessa cidade até 1751.
ResponderEliminarNeste ano, regressou de novo ao Maranhão tendo aí estado até 1754, ano em que regressou definitivamente para Portugal a rogo de D. Mariana de Áustria. Este foi talvez o maior erro da sua vida, como veremos.
Muito religioso, aproveitou o terramoto de 1755 para exortar os lisboetas à reforma dos seus costumes. Acicatado pela explicação das causas naturais da catástrofe, que circulou em folheto mandado publicar pelo poderoso ministro do rei D. José I, o Marquês de Pombal, escreveu uma pequena obra chamada Juízo da verdadeira causa do terramoto (1756) em que este se reputava de castigo divino e em que defendia que o infortúnio dos desalojados se consolava com procissões e exercícios espirituais.