Disappearance is usually felt as something bad. When things disappear, we sense the pull of death, the call of the dust, the loss of the palpable good. I have recently been moving house after many years in one place, with all its accumulations. Things, often intimate things, are left behind, given . . . . Continue Reading »
A Presbyterian colleague once explained to me that his rule of faith is to believe whatever is most “uplifting.” He found it more uplifting to believe in reincarnation than in death, judgment, and resurrection, because reincarnation “gives us as many chances as we need to get it right.” The . . . . Continue Reading »
The spirit of Mephistopheles is truly seductive, as Goethe well knew. Thankfully, however, there is still hope. Continue Reading »
With all the past persecutions of Christians in mind, what does Jesus mean when he says, “Not a hair of your head will perish”? Continue Reading »
Heaven,” Jonathan Edwards says in the fifteenth and last of his Charity Sermons, “is a World of Love.” In saying this, however, he did not seem to have in mind what many of us might -immediately hope for or suppose. To be sure, in one of his Miscellanies, asking himself “whether the . . . . Continue Reading »
The small mysteries of time and memory point beyond themselves, suggesting that more lies ahead of us in a reality that exceeds our grasp but which we will someday know firsthand. Continue Reading »
The Spirit won’t stop until all creation is heavenized, until all things unite in praise. Continue Reading »
David Bentley Hart has somehow twisted St. Basil’s warnings against the Devil’s trickery into—what Basil himself would call—support for the Devil and his purposes. Continue Reading »
Not until the nineteenth century did any Christian body make universal salvation its official teaching. The first to do so, the Universalist Church, later merged with another to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. Within the mainstream churches, medieval and early-modern universalists led a . . . . Continue Reading »
Why is it that our expectations for the life to come are so rarely mentioned? Continue Reading »
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