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This chapter examines the widely-held assumption that highly stressful and traumatic events are differentially remembered relative to events that are more affectively neutral or positive. This assumption is evaluated using data from a study of children's reports of the experience of a tornado that devastated the town of St. Peter, Minnesota, in March of 1998. The evaluation is multifaceted, featuring analyses of how much about the experience the children reported, the type of information they included, and the extent to which their reports were affected by the narrative style of their conversational partners, namely their mothers. It is shown that conversations about the tornado were longer than those about the nontraumatic events. Conversations about the tornado also had more breadth than those about the nontraumatic events. On the other hand, the level of detail provided about the traumatic and nontraumatic events did not differ. Similar patterns of relations between maternal verbal behavior and children's contributions were apparent for the tornado and the nontraumatic events.

The Introduction opens with two vignettes about recent tornadoes that struck Indiana and Illinois. For some Christians, the doctrine predestination resembles the capricious wrath of a twister: God elects certain persons for salvation while visiting destruction upon others. for other Christians, predestination is the rock of certainty—a doctrine of assurance in an unpredictable world. while most Catholic and Protestant thinkers have equated outright denial of predestination with atheism, they have disagreed mightily over whether God elects persons arbitrarily or based on some foreseen condition of merit or faith. This debate is the main focus of the book, which argues that predestination is the unacknowledged source of much American denominational division. The book further argues that predestinarianism has tended to work against sacramental understandings of Christianity in which grace is conveyed continually through ritual. The Introduction presents these arguments and previews the content of the six main chapters and Epilogue.

This chapter focuses on how the prisoners were able to create very fashionable pieces of hard rubber jewelry for their loved ones. Sources of hard rubber are discussed and the process for carving these items is outlined. The archaeological record is instrumental in providing the information necessary for interpreting the production of all the various types of jewelry created within the prison compound.

This chapter discusses the three important fluvial goddesses in Yoruban religion: Oya, Oshun, and Oba. They are the wives of Shango, who was discussed in the previous chapter. These goddesses are also associated with atmospheric phenomena; Oba is associated with wild clouds, Oya is associated with tornados, and Oshun is associated with gathering darkness.

A hotter climate means there will be more heat waves and heat-related illnesses, such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke, the leading causes of weather-related death in the US. Without mitigation, annual world-wide heat-related deaths may exceed 225,000 by 2050. Heat will spawn more extreme weather events such as severe thunderstorms, and tornadoes. Although the number of hurricanes may not increase, the moisture-laden air and warmer oceans will make those that do form more intense and deadly.

Chapter 3 traces the appearance of the first truly disastrous tornadoes as the new nation pushed westward into the Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. These calamities fueled an apocalyptic mentality among people of various religious groups, who regarded such events as the Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 as a sign of End Time tribulations. Later in the century, however, the emerging field of meteorology contributed to a Gilded Age cult of progress that presupposed a benevolent God and assumed that tornadoes could be explained and maybe even contained. Even a disaster as enormous as the St. Louis Tornado of 1896, which destroyed much of the city, was not enough to shake the optimism of some clergy and theologians, who thought that as the scientific mysteries of tornadoes were dispelled, fears of divine wrath in the storm would cease.

Chapter 4 shows how twentieth-century weather disasters helped force some of the nation’s leading theologians to question old assumptions about providence and natural events. Especially at mid-century, which is usually remembered for Cold War anxieties, the weather influenced reconsiderations of providence by such thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr, Georgia Harkness, and William Pollard, who, in different ways, broached the idea of randomness or amorality in nature. Newspaper coverage of two catastrophic events—the Tri-State Tornado of 1925 and the Palm Sunday Tornadoes of 1965—likewise revealed rising religious ambivalence on the popular level. Thus, even as some Americans were defending the time-worn belief that all things happen according to a plan, others were contemplating a world of radical uncertainty and unpredictability.

This chapter discusses the breakdown and rebuilding of the electric grid in Potsdam in January 1998. It discusses how, unlike the focused, piercing devastation of a tornado, hurricane, flood, or earthquake, the breakdown of the grid took a week to evolve as it slowly, incrementally compressed the power grid past the breaking point. The heaviest accumulations covered the Seaway valley from its source at the eastern edge of Lake Ontario across a wide path north and south of the river all the way past Montreal. When the rain finally stopped falling, those lands were under more than four inches of ice. The chapter discusses various problems that people of the affected area had to face, and also discusses how power was restored in the region and the grid was brought back to normal.

In this chapter, the author reflects on how history could influence activism in Alabama in the aftermath of two disasters, “one natural and one manmade.” In the spring of 2011, tornadoes devastated communities across Alabama, including those where Latino immigrants live. Simultaneously, the state's Republican politicians introduced HB 56, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. Already suffering in communities devastated by tornadoes, the state's Latinos and Latinas now also feared attending public schools and could not easily do any business that required a contract. The author, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, recounts how the students in his service learning class joined a multiethnic, multiracial group of more than 4,000 people who gathered at a symbolic site for an earlier civil rights movement: Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. His story demonstrates how service learning can contribute to students' new interest in civic engagement and activism.

The Introduction opens with the story of the 1953 Worcester, Massachusetts, tornado, the deadliest in New England history, as a segue into the book’s central argument: in the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar (the indigenous storm of the national imagination) and religiously primal (the sense of awe before an unpredictable and mysterious power). No nation has more violent tornadoes than the United States, where a frontier mentality, combined with an Enlightenment-born confidence in scientific progress, has perennially tempted residents to believe they can understand and master the weather. But efforts to unlock tornadoes’ secrets have exposed how little removed Americans are from their premodern ancestors in finding themselves at the mercy of the whirlwind. Americans thus encounter in the tornado something akin to what religion theorist Rudolf Otto called the numinous: an uncanny, uncontrollable, and awe-inspiring mystery.

Chapter 1 interweaves the story of the 1974 Xenia, Ohio, tornado (part of the infamous Super Outbreak) with background on the pivotal role of weather in the premodern and early modern history of religions. The storm god tradition, exemplified by the biblical Yahweh and other deities from across the world’s cultures, laid the conceptual foundation for later American interpretations of the weather. Medieval and early modern theologians drew on elements of this tradition in devising their more rationalistic doctrines of providence, but in so doing they bequeathed to later generations a tangle of logical difficulties. Among these was the question of what role, if any, chance played in the weather. To John Calvin, “chance” was a pagan notion, but excluding chance exacerbated the problem of theodicy, or why a benevolent God allowed deadly storms and other natural evils.

Chapter 5 turns to Oklahoma, ground zero of the most violent tornadoes on the planet, where an evangelical Protestant culture meets the frontiers of contemporary meteorological research. Deadly tornadoes in Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, have made particularly raw the long-festering question of whether God controls everything that happens. But Oklahomans have also had to confront the converse problem of human complicity in disasters, especially in an era of climate change. Evangelical politicians from Oklahoma have had a disproportionate influence on climate policy in the Trump administration, which has denied the looming crisis of global warming, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. At the local level, Oklahomans have also had to reckon with the challenge of disaster preparedness, especially the funding of school storm shelters, in a state that often resists governmental “intrusion.”