Payton treats the January 2010 earthquake as a spiritual event as much as a physical one, arguing that some of its deepest effects registered in how survivors understood their world. The evidence comes from recorded life histories gathered after the disaster.

Those testimonies complicate a familiar opposition. Protestantism on one side, Catholicism and Vodou on the other, are usually cast as irreconcilable; what survivors say suggests instead that the traditions borrow from and shape one another.

The article doubles as an account of the Haiti Memory Project, an oral history effort documenting what the quake meant for Haiti's poor majority. Interviews were conducted in Haitian Kreyol, French and English, and the piece preserves that multilingualism: two audio excerpts sit inside the text, with links to further clips and to three complete interviews from the collection.