The Wind That Strips Everything Bare

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. In the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, residents who had ignored evacuation warnings woke to a sound like a freight train. Within hours, the levees broke. Streets became rivers. Homes lifted off their foundations and floated like toys in a bathtub.

When the waters finally receded weeks later, photographer Robert Polidori documented what remained. Block after block of mud-caked wreckage. Trees stripped to gray skeletons. A child's shoe half-buried in silt beside an overturned refrigerator. The land looked, as one reporter wrote, "like creation running in reverse."

That phrase could have come straight from Jeremiah. The prophet describes a vision of the earth "formless and void" — the exact Hebrew words from Genesis 1:2, before God spoke light into being. The mountains quake. The birds flee. The fruitful land becomes a desert. It is un-creation, the terrible unwinding of everything God had made good.

And the cause? "My people are foolish; they do not know Me. They are skilled in doing evil; they know not how to do good."