experience suffering alone — it “islands” us — and for the people involved, scale doesn’t matter so much. Even a mega-disaster like the tsunami zooms in personally: a child swept away from a kindergarten playground, a family business destroyed in an instant, a teenager terrified by the aftershocks that hit weekly, everyone frightened by the invisible threat of radiation. Theologian Hart goes on to note a secret irony hidden in the arguments of the skeptics: “They would never have occurred to consciences