Archive


More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.

Articles

Filter

Articles

Heaven in Ohio?

Jerry L. Walls

The Heavenly Tableby donald ray pollockdoubleday, 384 pages, $27.95 A book by Donald Ray Pollock is always an entertaining ride, by turns riveting, hilarious, revolting, and poignant. But reading...

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

Jerry L. Walls

I suppose it is appropriate for a book on eternal life to be long. Given the ground Alan Segal, a professor of Jewish studies at Columbia University, covers, Life...

Purgatory for Everyone

Jerry L. Walls

A few years ago, the journalist Philip Nobile wrote an article near the first anniversary of the death of Princess Diana in which he raised what he termed “an...

Doing Theodicy

Jerry L. Walls

Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evilby john g. stackhouse, jr.oxford university press, 190 pages, $25 The problem of evil is a perennially baffling intellectual puzzle...

Do Only Christians Know?

Jerry L. Walls

Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics By Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches University of Notre Dame Press. 230 pp. $29.95 Virtue is making a...

The Formation of Hell

Jerry L. Walls

The author of this book did not intend to write it. Originally this material was supposed to be merely an introductory section of a one-volume history of hell in...