LUCKY SEVERSON (Correspondent): Few cities around the world can match the stunning skyline of Hong Kong. Architecture here is a big deal, and so is the 3,000 year old Chinese practice of Feng Shui.  Few skyscrapers are constructed without the advice of a Feng Shui master, and Raymond Lo is one of a handful of “grand” masters.

RAYMOND LO (Feng Shui Grand Master): Definitely, Hong Kong is a Feng Shui city. You can see Hong Kong is such a tiny spot in such a big country. Why Hong Kong is so unique? Because it enjoys the best Feng Shui.

SEVERSON: Nury Vittachi is an internationally syndicated columnist and author of over 30 books, including several about Feng Shui.

NURY VITTACHI (Author): One of the great things about Hong Kong is that it’s very rational and businesslike but at the same time, we believe in magic and we take it very seriously.

SEVERSON: Feng Shui is about more than tall buildings. People here practice it in their apartments and gardens and in their lives.

LO: Feng Shui means that it is an ancient Chinese knowledge which is talking about how the environment will affect people’s well-being. So the Chinese has discovered in their environment that different kind of energy. Some are good energy, which make you improve your health, improve your relationship with people and also improve your money. And there are negative energy which will do the opposite.

SEVERSON: Mr. Lo views himself as a scientist who, with the right tools, can actually measure good and bad energy.

LO: Of course this is an instrument we need. This is a compass, and those characters and numbers are actually the formula which the Feng Shui master, they have invented. So basically this is an instrument we use to measure the direction of the building and then based on the direction and based on the time the building was built, we can establish where is the good energy and where is the bad energy.

SEVERSON: Nury Vittachi’s columns are known for their humor and irony, and he finds plenty of both among the power structures of downtown Hong Kong.

VITTACHI: So you’d think this would be the most rational, number-focused place on earth, but in fact, Feng Shui rules even here.  As the building was being put up and finishing touches were being arranged, a Feng Shui master said, “Oh, it’s too regular. Everything is on a grid shape here and you’ve got to put something askew.”

SEVERSON: So plans for the escalators were changed. They are no longer perpendicular, they run askew.

VITTACHI: It does seem to have worked because over the last 20 years since this building was created, HSBC has grown to become literally one of the biggest banks in the world.

SEVERSON: This being Hong Kong, our next building is another bank and more Feng Shui.

VITTACHI: This is the Standard Charter bank building which has taken the idea of mixing money and spirituality very seriously in that, although it’s the headquarters of a major bank, it has a church-like feel or a temple-like feel, right up to the extent of having stained glass windows. But instead of religious icons, you have the trappings of modernity, you have computers, a gold mobile phone, aircraft, that sort of thing.  It’s done in a good spirit and the community loves it.

SEVERSON: Our next building is the Bank of China which was built by an architect from the States who apparently didn’t realize that the diamond designed exterior is a negative shape in Feng Shui, and the diamonds were pointed directly at the governor’s house.

VITTACHI: And the governor lost his job, so they built a swimming pool between this and the governor’s house so that the water would take away the negative energy. It didn’t work. The replacement governor had a heart attack.

SEVERSON: Today the bank has a moat around it.

VITTACHI: You notice the fish are mostly different shades of gold, and they represent, of course, gold flowing around your life. So, definitely a prosperity theme at this bank.

SEVERON: As an example of how seriously Hong Kong takes Feng Shui, in recent years, the city has spent more than 8 million dollars compensating people living next to construction sites because all that activity disturbed their Feng Shui.

Nury says some people go a little overboard when it comes to Feng Shui.

VITTACHI: If you move your desk over here a bit, you know, suddenly grandma will feel better. You know, if you move your desk a bit there, she’ll feel great. You move your desk too far and she dies. You know, there’s that sort of feng shui which I think is very… It’s clearly superstitious. But I think underpinning all that, there’s just good psychological sense. If you make your environment feel good, if you focus away from material things to spiritual things, it’s good for everybody.

LO: Actually Feng Shui encompass every walk of your life. Everything in life. There’s always a logic, a reason, behind things happening. So therefore you have an answer. If you don’t know Feng Shui, don’t care about Feng Shui, that means everything seems to be mystery.

SEVERSON: Raymond Lo has taught Feng Shui classes all over the world, including the U.S. where an increasing number of architects are using the practice in their house designs.

WILLIAM PAGE (Architect): The good energy that you are bringing in, it funnels into the front entrance.

SEVERSON: William Page is a Seattle-based architect who builds and sells houses.  He uses Feng Shui principles in his designs.

PAGE: A curved wall lets the good energy that comes in, the good Chi that comes in, dissipate throughout the building.

SEVERSON: He says the Feng Shui must be working, at least for him.  It’s helped him sell houses.

PAGE: It is said that you should not have a stove directly across from a sink because one is fire and one is water and they do not mix. It is important not to have the head of the bed backing up against a bathroom because it tends to flush the energy down the drain.

SEVERSON: Back in Hong Kong, Nury Vittachi takes us to a Buddhist shrine in the middle of a lively business district.  In his view, the shrine is part of the Feng Shui of this neighborhood, the calming and centering part.

VITTACHI: There’s a big tree actually growing right here, you know, in between the floor and the ceiling of this temple.  What a lovely unity between man and nature.  I mean, I actually think it is a very religious community. Behind every temple, every village, every modern skyscrapers, including the stock exchange, you will find something like this. You’ll find a little shrine. Spirituality, Feng Shui, is very much woven deeply into the fabric of a very rational, scientific, business-obsessed community.

SEVERSON: A business community so rational that executives decided to shift the angle of the entrance to the Hong Kong Disneyland theme park by 12 degrees after a Feng Shui master said the change would result in the park’s prosperity.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Hong Kong.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Faith-based and international aid groups rushed to help victims of the catastrophes in Japan. It’s estimated that more than 10,000 people were killed by the massive earthquake and tsunami. Japanese officials say more than 450,000 are homeless and in need of supplies. Humanitarian efforts, however, have been severely complicated by radiation from four of the country’s nuclear reactors.

We get more from Dave Toycen, the president and chief executive officer of the Christian aid group World Vision Canada. We spoke to him by phone from Tokyo on Friday night (March 18). Dave, thanks so much for staying up so late to talk with us. Are you and the others doing relief work there, are you able to get to all the people who need help, and do you have the supplies you need to help them?

DAVE TOYCEN (President and CEO, World Vision Canada): Well, basically we do. We’re anticipating we’ll be raising somewhere between $10 and $20 million, so our team here has already spent, you know, a chunk of that because they know it’s coming. But of course we believe we’re going to be able to raise that amount of money, and of course that turns into supplies and things that we can provide here. So, yes, I am positive about that.

ABERNETHY: But you are able to, or the people who are in need are able to get help from you or from the government or from somebody else, right?

TOYCEN: Yes, generally so. My perception is, in the conversations we’ve had, what I’ve seen first hand, people are getting at least the basics of life. That means water, food on a daily basis, and most people now are in schools, gymnasiums, community centers, so that they are at least not out in the elements. It was minus four this morning with about ten, well, eight inches of snow.

ABERNETHY: What have you seen that moved you the most?

TOYCEN: Well, I think one of the things that moves me so much is in every one of these centers they have sheets of paper with people either saying yes, I’m alive and I’m at this location. The other ones that are even more poignant are the ones where you read where people are saying I am looking for my son, my daughter, do you know about them? And that always touches your heart. That just really, really touches your heart. And today I had a mother say to me, you know, this has been awful, but it’s my kids. The fact that my kids are alive, and children are precious because they remind us that life is about hope, and even our children in the midst of these difficult circumstances they still find the time to be happy and joyful. That’s humbling.

ABERNETHY: Dave, very quickly, we are almost out of time, but a lot of people are saying, well, we don’t need to give anything because Japan is a first-world country. It’s well organized. They don’t need as much help as perhaps people at other places and other disasters. How would you respond to them?

TOYCEN: Well, my first comment is yes, you’re right to a certain extent. They don’t need as much help. This is a first-world country. But, on the other hand, my experience is that most of us, or many of us at least, when somebody’s in trouble we have a sense we want to help out in some ways. And then when you think about, even I think of. say. Hurricane Katrina in the United States, how much Americans appreciated, at least that’s the feedback I got, when people from Canada and other places in the world came in and pitched in and gave, either volunteered or gave some money. So I think everybody has to make their choice, and we’re so pleased at World Vision. We’ve had so many people who want to step up and say we’re willing to help in Japan and send a message of hope.

ABERNETHY: Dave Toycen of World Vision Canada. Many thanks.

Faith groups around the world held prayer services this week for victims of the disasters. Meanwhile, some observers have spoken about the strong cultural and spiritual resources the Japanese have displayed as they deal with the catastrophe. Reverend Maggie Izutsu is an Episcopal priest who is also an expert on Asian bereavement rituals. She lived in Japan for many years and joins us now from Austin, Texas, where she leads the organization the Rite Source. Maggie, welcome.

REV. MAGGIE IZUTSU: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

ABNERNETHY: As you see the way the Japanese people are responding to these tragedies, what stands out for you?

IZUTSU: I guess one of the things that my mind keeps going to is how they don’t ask the question “why me?” They’re not consumed with wondering what put them in harm’s way. They know they’re in harm’s way. They are very attentive to their surroundings, and they have a great reverence and fear of nature.

ABERNETHY: And so a disaster is just part of life? Multiple disasters are just part of life? You accept it and get on with things—pick up and continue you life?

IZUTSU: Yes, I believe so. I think that partly comes from their Shinto tradition of this reverence for nature and their understanding of the vicissitudes of nature and capriciousness of nature. It’s also part of their Buddhist tradition that understands that all things are impermanent and things are subject to change, and they don’t see themselves as entitled to good fortune all the time or even good fortune ever. Of course, they seek that and they strive for that, but that’s not their focus.

ABERNETHY: We’ve seen a little disruption—frustrations of trying to get supplies and things. But, in general, the images have been of people who are very orderly and very respectful of each other. Talk about that a little bit.

IZUTSU: Yes, well, I think that may come from very early training that is part and parcel of the Confucian tradition, which was imported from China, that seeks to make every opportunity in life—in daily life, secular life, as well as spiritual life or, more pointedly, religious life—an opportunity for moral self-cultivation, and it starts at a very early age. For instance, my son in a three-year-old’s class at nursery school’s teacher would talk about how she went home every night to try to understand how she could better inculcate a sense of little Johnny’s effect on little Tommy in terms of how he was behaving. So that sensibility of commiseration or empathy or understanding how our behavior affects other people starts there at a very early age.

ABERNETHY: And now there is the grieving and the rituals that are available, too, for helping people through that. What are the most important of those?

IZUTSU: The Buddhist tradition, as well as the new religions, have these very elaborate, very elongated memorial services—a sequence of memorial rites that go on literally ad infinitem, and they’re a wonderful occasion for families and friends of the deceased to come together at sporadic intervals to remember the deceased and share in the support that they can offer each other in that process. It also serves, I think, as a context for remembering the relative nature of our own egos, and the place that we have in this vast line of our ancestors and hopefully the progeny that will yet be coming, and to remember our place in society, and that also becomes a context for remembering that behaving well is a very important attribute of living.

ABERNETHY: Reverend Maggie Izutsu of the Rite Source in Austin, Texas. Many thanks.

IZUTSU: Thank you.

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BOB FAW, correspondent: With a few deft strokes—one line here, another there—the figures almost magically, come to life: a dog, Earl, or a cat, Mooch, appearing in the comic strip Mutts since 1994 and now syndicated in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries. Since he could hold a crayon, Patrick McDonnell has been drawing cartoons and so much more. Every morning McDonnell is up around 5:30 with his cat MeeMow, and just before he sits down to create, he reads something spiritual.

PATRICK MCDONNELL: It reminds me what is important, and especially in doing the comic strip. I try to be funny and everything, but I always try to think of a higher purpose: how I can serve the world a little bit with my comics? Cartoons help you slow down, which is a big part of the message—to slow down.

FAW: The world of all those characters mirrors his own world in Edison, New Jersey, one acre of tranquility where deer often graze and a cat sleeps on a nearby window sill—reminders, says McDonnell, of this stillness all around and that true happiness is found in simple things.

MCDONNELL: You know, our cat is just purring and sleeping in the sunlight. I think it’s finding that, you know, life is stillness. When we are with our cat and dog we kind of let go our troubles and ourselves and just become like them, which is like being happy in the present.

FAW: For 19 years, McDonnell observed those moments of stillness, that celebration of life with his Jack Russell terrier, Earl, the inspiration for Mutts. Now he tries to do the same with his new dog, Amelie.

MCDONNELL: When I play ball with my dog, every once in a while I will throw the ball horrible, and I will think if I was with a person and I threw the ball horrible, they’d probably say, “Well, come on.” You know, the dog doesn’t care. He just goes after the ball and is happy to come back. That’s a big lesson to learn.

FAW: It’s the simplest, truest things, he says, which we could learn from animals if only we would let them be our “guardians of being.”

MCDONNELL: I think cats and dogs are in the moment. You know, I think that they give us that gift. I think if you have a cat on your lap that’s purring, it’s hard to think about all the troubles in the world and your own life and really you can just relax and let go and be in the now.

FAW: It’s a mindset which infuses McDonnell’s comic strips and his books, one he recently did with the spiritual teacher and best-selling author Eckhart Tolle.

MCDONNELL: Like millions of other people, I was immediately taken with his work. He really gets to the basics. With a cartoonist you only have three panels. You have to get to the point, and I felt like he really got to the core of, you know, spirituality—spirituality and just being in the present moment. So, you know, he really influenced my work and influenced my life.

FAW: Patrick saw a photo of Tolle with his dog, Maya, and decided to contact him about collaborating on a book.

MCDONNELL: In Eckhart’s work he talks a lot about nature bringing us to stillness. You know, Mutts is about stopping and smelling the roses and how our dog and cat can help us do that, so I mean I felt an instant connection with his work. My wife and I went through a lot of his recordings and his books, and anytime he mentioned a dog or a cat we took out that little quote, and we paired them up best we could with some of my comics.

FAW: For example, when Tolle wrote “live in the now”…

MCDONNELL: I had Earl and Mooch talking about trying to live in the now and made a little, you know, gag out of it.

FAW: To remind you that?

MCDONNELL: That we should live in the now, yeah.

FAW: Or when Tolle wrote that he’s met several Zen masters, and they all happened to be cats.

MCDONNELL: I did have a strip where Mooch is sitting on his little bed and purring and meditating away and just kind of disappears and all that’s left is the purr.

FAW: In whatever McDonnell draws, wisdom is much the same. Take his picture book “Just Like Heaven,” where Mooch falls asleep and thinks he died and went to heaven.

MCDONNELL: He goes around and sees all the things that he’s lived with his whole life, but he sort of sees them through new eyes now because, wow, this is heaven, so you know, I think the point of the book is probably back to the stillness.

FAW: Living in the present is where heaven is?

MCDONNELL: Yeah, yeah.

FAW: That’s your message?

MCDONNELL: That was the message of that book, yeah.

FAW: The spiritualism of Tolle and cartoon genius of McDonnell can be distilled in just three—and sometimes even one—small panel.

MCDONNELL: To me that’s the magic of it. You can say so much in so little.

FAW: Captured recently, too, in this public service announcement which McDonnell helped create for the Humane Society of the United States, where he sits on the board.

Public Service Announcement: I’m afraid to open my eyes. I’m afraid yesterday was all a dream and I’ll wake up and still be in the shelter.

FAW: Whether in an animated version, the so-called funny papers, or even in hardback, there is something in McDonnell’s simple drawings which deals with what matters most.

MCDONNELL: I mean, it’s definitely what’s underneath the strip—like Peanuts. I feel Peanuts had the same spirituality, but it, you know, wasn’t hitting you over the head with it.

FAW: These are your words now: “Spirituality is integral to both my life and my work.”

MCDONNELL: I think that’s why we’re here and the most important thing. When you sit at the drawing table it is a meditation, yeah, and a prayer, a little prayer when you do these little comics. They’re like little prayers to the universe.

FAW: So given all that you don’t feel you need to belong to a church, you don’t need a set of doctrines?

MCDONNELL: I just think God is everywhere. I think we’re living in church. Nature’s church.

FAW: Finding in the life around him, which McDonnell tries to put in comic form, what Eckhart Tolle calls “a spark of the divine.”

MCDONNELL: If we just saw all life as one and, you know, and all beings as, you know, a piece of—a spark of the divine, I think all the problems would go away. Our mind just fills us with problems and things to constantly nibble at and work on. In the meantime, there’s just this peaceful stillness all around us we’re not paying attention to.

FAW: Which Patrick McDonnell is trying to change through comics—his “little prayers to the universe” reminding us to slow down and live better.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Edison, New Jersey.

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In 1996, Tom and Kitty Stoner started the TKF Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, to create spaces that would “offer a temporary place of sanctuary, encourage reflection, provide solace, and engender peace.” The foundation has helped develop more than one hundred sites, from urban community gardens to labyrinths and healing spaces at hospitals, medical centers, churches, prisons, and correctional facilities. Each project is developed in partnership with local community leaders. We talked with Tom Stoner and executive director Mary Wyatt who explained why these open spaces are also sacred places.

Produced by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly production assistant Fabio Lomelino and Web producer Fred Yi

In 1996, Tom and Kitty Stoner started the TKF Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, to create spaces that would “offer a temporary place of sanctuary, encourage reflection, provide solace, and engender peace.” The foundation has helped develop more than one hundred sites, from urban community gardens to labyrinths and healing spaces at hospitals, medical centers, churches, prisons, and correctional facilities. Each project is developed in partnership with local community leaders. Watch founder Tom Stoner and executive director Mary Wyatt explain why these open spaces are also sacred places.

Originally broadcast December 11, 2009

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a segment today on going into the wilderness to experience the presence of God. John Lionberger is a former atheist who had a profound religious experience on a wilderness trip. Now an ordained United Church of Christ minister, Lionberger leads others looking for their own experience of the holy. Lionberger is the author of “Renewal in the Wilderness.” He lives in Evanston, Illinois. Earlier this fall, I asked him what happens to the people he takes to the wilderness.

Rev. JOHN LIONBERGER (Author, “Renewal in the Wilderness”): What they encounter in the wilderness is getting away from all of the things in society that we call “trappings” that are meant to be good things, but that keep them away from a more authentic and deeper relationship with God.

ABERNETHY: Lionberger’s trips begin with his coaching.

LIONBERGER: I think what happens for them is they get to the transcendent through the physical—the act of canoeing, the act of setting up camp. I like to say it strips them of the barnacles that they accrue throughout their lives and society, and they begin to realize how little they need to be profoundly happy. They are able to simplify, and in that simplification they get a sense of something holy about what surrounds them, a sense of well being and a sense of being cared for and a sense of profound peace, and it’s kind of a hackneyed phrase—“Be in the moment”—but there is something so powerful about it, because that is the moment, in the very present is when God comes to us. It is much easier, I think, for God to get through our defenses when we’re in a wilderness.

ABERNETHY: I asked Lionberger to recall the conversion experience he had when he was alone on skis on a frozen lake in winter.

LIONBERGER: It was getting dark, and the trees were etched against the skyline in kind of blackness while the skyline was turning purple. I just looked up at the sky and put my arms out like this, with the poles dangling from my wrists, and arched my back, and at that moment I felt like I was in the midst of a warm stream of water that felt so pure and so refreshing and so cleansing and so friendly and so loving, and then it kept coming into my mind, slowly at first, and very dimly at first, but it said, “It’s God.”

Sometimes there are those wonderful explosive moments of experiencing God, but most of the time it’s very, very subtle. It’s just the small things that people ignore that being out in an environment like that brings them to an awareness of. It reminds us of who we are, who we are not, and who God is.

ABERNETHY: Back home, Lionberger tries to recapture some of the wilderness experience in a park near his house, and he says all people can do that.

LIONBERGER: I suggest to them that they have an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, and they do it very consciously. It is part of being here now. It’s part of what the wilderness teaches you.

ABERNETHY: I asked Lionberger whether some people come on his trips and have no sense of anything holy.

LIONBERGER: In the eight years I’ve been doing this, and maybe the 400 people that I’ve taken to the wilderness, I only know of one man who was not really touched by his experience in some way, who said at the end, “I had a good time, but I got no spiritual insight, no spiritual awakenings, nothing like that.” And that is not a bad batting average, one out of 400. I’ll take that.

Writing in the New York Times about “Avatar” (“Luminous 3-D Jungle is a Biologist’s Dream”) , Carol Kaesuk Yoon rhapsodizes over the beauty and variety of life depicted in the film. “With each glance, we are reminded of organisms we already know, while marveling over the new…It has recreated what is at the heart of biology: the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing (my emphasis) the natural world.” To Yoon, and to this observer as well, the firing up of that “sense of wonder,” a phrase most notably introduced into modern discussions of biology and education by environmentalist Rachel Carson in her book of the same title, is central to the film’s impact.

But almost simultaneously with this comes a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation that boggles the mind: on average, the amount of time spent plugged into an electronic device for the population from eight to 18 years of age is seven-and-a-half hours per day. This is equivalent to a 53-hour work week. All of these kids’ waking time outside of school is spent connected to something (often more than one device).

As author and journalist Richard Louv has warned in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2008 updated and expanded), children are especially in need of contact—first-hand, in-their-skin-contact—with nature. A rich, ornery, lungingly actual relationship with living Creation is necessary, utterly necessary, to inform the deepest sympathy with life on the planet, human life included. Such a relationship, fully and carefully developed over time, teaches responsibility and connectedness. It teaches birth, death, glory,transformation. It teaches decay, failure, and triumph. It teaches ocean truth and luna moth truth, parasite truth and pomegranate truth, volcano truth and tsunami truth—the marvelous continuum of the human and natural, and it teaches finally the unplumbable mystery of “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence,” as Annie Dillard puts it.

This rich and tragic sense of nature’s presence, power, and complexity does not require wilderness. With focused attention and effective preparation, something of it can be experienced in a suburban back yard, or along the banks of any edge-of-the-subdivision creek or golf course pond.

But in our schools there is very little training in how to see nature, in forming the habit of spending time outdoors without being driven by some sporting agenda. Outside of the one week in the year when a small handful of us learn about urban gardening, my students’ shoes never show the signs of woodsy mud. The knees of their jeans are never yellow with clay they have knelt in, rapt in observation of an insect or fossil. Their sweaters never bear the seeds of burdocks or thistles, those obvious signs of having brushed up against something other than a plastic mall kiosk. Instead of sharpening their students’ eyes for the natural world and opening their hearts to an environmental ethic, so many schools have leaped on the media bandwagon that brags to the public of their technological prowess, of how “wired” they are, of how technologically savvy their students are becoming.

What if such claims are dead wrong? What if such uncritical adoption of more and more technology is a form of contributing to the delinquency of our students in as clear a way as selling cigarettes to kiddies behind the gym or providing cases of beer to underage drivers who eventually wrap themselves and their friends around telephone poles? Where is the research that shows us all is well?

When I entertain such thoughts, the news from the Kaiser Family Foundation is as unsettling to me as any I have heard. It is the more unsettling because it is not the result of sinister overseas forces intent on ruining us, but is rather the result of the successful marketing of, and the constant invention and reinvention of, artificial “needs” that capitalism thrives on. The ubiquitousness of electronic devices in youth culture is so great that it has apparently obscured rational adult thinking. Quoted in another recent New York Times article by Tamar Lewin (“If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online”) Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston, says there’s no use arguing whether so much electronics consumption is good or bad, because these devices have become “like the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat.”

Exactly. Yes. And since we clearly know that water, air, and food are sometimes tainted and dangerous, shouldn’t we then form some sort of Environmental Protection Agency to monitor the ill effects of all these devices in the hands and ears and bedrooms and classrooms of our children? And how do we explain to ourselves why so many parents seem to have conceded to their children’s willy-nilly desire for all the gizmos and gadgets? Are they aware of the effects of addiction—any addiction, whether to tobacco, or heroin, or pornography, or texting? I had a student two years ago who, as part of a class project, stopped using her cell phone. After the first day, she reported, she was “half-crazy”; after the second, she was driven to distraction; after the third, she was utterly “sick with myself for being so needy for a phone!”

Incidentally, the seven-and-a-half hours per day of electronic media consumption does not include the 90 minutes of texting and 30 minutes of talking on the phone kids reported on the Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Picture the typical day of such kids: outside of school and sleeping, there is for some of them not a minute during which they are not umbilicaled to an electronic device or two. Unaware of the weather outside, increasingly obese and diabetic, they must come to live in a Silent Spring of electronic origin, bereft of any awareness of anything but what has lurking beneath it not the voice of the wind or the great moanings of the sea, but some manufactured hum of circuitry. They are slipping further and further away from the incarnation, through their senses, of the material world, and they are oblivious.

I think of this as potentially one of the most significant withdrawals of human beings from the natural world in the history of our species. Unchecked for a generation or two, what sorts of people will these wired citizens be? Will they ever experience significant personal confrontations with, and difficult ruminations about, physical nature—the kinds of encounters both sublime and terrifying that have for millennia challenged humans with opportunities to grow toward wisdom and a sense of right behavior on this planet? If the electronic center of their increasingly virtual reality cannot hold (and recent cyber attacks hint at the vulnerability of such an overly centralized system), what fundamental, eons-old traditions of spiritual, physical, and intellectual survival will they have lost? Will their only nature be a succession of “Avatar” films, creating for them an avatar world, a virtual and substitute Creation in which, crippled by nature deficiency, 3-D goggled, and in a dark more ominous than that of the theater, they can vicariously leap and bound and be seized by a counterfeit wonder in a counterfeit environment lost to them in reality?

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s withering Christian attack on a way of life that paralyzed even those who knew it was wrong, Marie St. Clare, the hypochondriac and self-centered mistress of Tom, whines, “Well, at any rate, I’m thankful I’m born where slavery exists; and I believe it’s right—indeed, I feel it must be; and, at any rate, I’m sure I couldn’t get along without it.” Aside from her unconscious fumbling with logic and rationalization, her last thought is the one that chills me. If—just if—we wanted to protect our children from falling out of the world of Creation, can we imagine recalling all the devices already in their hands? Can we imagine them, and ourselves, getting along without iPods, PlayStations, MP3 players, TVs, more and more computers in the schools, portable DVD players, X-Boxes? Can we imagine the paroxysms to our economy if the sales of these were as limited or heavily taxed as the sales of alcohol and tobacco?

“Unimaginable,” many, if not most, would say. Equally unimaginable, and nearly unforgivable, is what may already be happening to our wired and exiled children.

Richard Hague is in his 40th year of teaching at Purcell Marian High School, an urban Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio. His latest book is “Public Hearings” (Word Press, 2009), a collection of poems social, political, and satirical.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Earthquakes and other calamities always provoke anguished questions about God’s role in disaster. How do religious leaders respond? Rabbi Jack Moline serves Congregation Agudas Achim in Alexandria, Virginia. Rabbi, welcome.

RABBI JACK MOLINE: Thank you, Bob.

ABERNETHY: When people come to you and say where was God in what happened in Haiti, what do you tell them?

MOLINE: The glib answer is to just say God was there. But I was walking through the synagogue the other day and a couple of kids were horsing around. One of them bumped her head and started to cry. Her friend immediately apologized, and I walked over and gave her a hug. I wasn’t able to stop the pain, but I was able to share it with her a little bit, as was her friend. I think that’s where God is—sharing that pain.

ABERNETHY: With the people who are suffering, suffering with them?

MOLINE: With the people who are suffering. Absolutely.

ABERNETHY: What about causing it in some way in the first place?

MOLINE: Well, I think if we consider God to be the creator of nature, which I do, that this earthquake was going to happen. It was inevitable. So in that sense God caused it. But I entirely reject the notion that this was some sort of punishment for the bad behavior of the Haitian people.

ABERNETHY: Some people who survive say, why me? Why was I spared? I’ve lost my husband or wife or something, and yet here I am. What do you say to them?

MOLINE: Well, again, you know, on location you have to offer them comfort. But the question is the same as the question of did God cause this? The answer is I don’t see God micromanaging the world, plucking this one and abandoning that one. It simply is the nature of these things that we choose to be in the way of disaster sometime.

ABERNETHY: And is there a role  for prayer in preventing this kind of thing?

MOLINE: Prayer can’t prevent a natural disaster, but prayer can create a response in us that is appropriate. Psalm 147, for example, says that God is the healer of shattered hearts and the binder of wounds, knowing the number of stars in the sky and calling each one by name. When we recite that in prayer, and when we recite that prayerfully, it should inspire in us the same kind of reaction.

ABERNETHY: And are there lessons, theological lessons, religious lessons that come out of all this?

MOLINE: Probably, but the good news is, for all of us I think, they don’t have to be solved in our moment or even in our lifetime any more than they have been for the past history of the human community.

ABERNETHY: But there is something to be said about human responsibility—to make sure that buildings are constructed well and not shoddily?

MOLINE: I think the more we can do to prevent human suffering, the less we will be held responsible by whatever standard for human suffering that was preventable.

ABERNETHY: Rabbi Jack Moline, many thanks.

MOLINE: Thank you, Bob.