Word: burtons
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...Kreeft complains that even if our basic belief has not wavered, "our sense of beauty, glory, wonder, awe, magnificence, triumph has shrunk" into something "joyless." Marked by an apparent combination of lay ignorance and pastoral skittishness, the minimization of paradise not only creates problems for heaven-hungry believers like Burton; it also suggests the marginalization of one of Western civilization's greatest ideas...
Amen to that. David Burton, however, has managed to find a church that is not waiting for a funeral service to talk to him about that which touches his soul. When he moved to Nashville five years ago, he found Fathers William Fleming and Patrick Kibby of the Cathedral of the Incarnation. Burton says they were not only willing to state in their homilies that heaven is the appropriate reward for a life of faith and work. They were, in fact, "always reminding us that this life is not all there is. We're being called to something much greater...
That was all Burton needed to hear. There is a cheerful babble today as his Catholic ritual class, having completed an earnest discussion on the intricacies of Lenten observance, joins the rest of the congregation for coffee and doughnuts. A woman comes up to Burton carrying a beautiful, cruller-smeared little girl in her arms and tells a visitor how much help, both spiritual and practical, Burton gave her in adopting a Chinese child. He is embarrassed but obviously pleased. The present and the future both look pretty good. "The important thing," he says, "is I know what...
What, indeed? University of California at Santa Barbara professor Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of the upcoming A History of Heaven (Princeton University Press), says, "I think [clerics] want to stay off the subject because they feel they're going to have to climb a wall of popular skepticism." A spokesman for the United Methodist Publishing House is reluctant to comment at all about heaven, explaining that the subject is "controversial." A brother in faith, the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, whose Foundry Methodist Church is up the street from the White House, explains bluntly, "I'm not interested in speculating...
...congregations, heaven is found mostly in hymns, preserved like a bug in amber. There are still some churches where one can find a robust heavenly vision in the late 1990s--among Southern Baptists, and African-American denominations as a whole. But most late-20th century American Christians, observes Jeffrey Burton Russell, have a better grasp of heaven's cliches than of its allures. "It's this place where you've got wings, you stand on a cloud, and if the concept is more sophisticated, where you see God and you sing hymns. It's a boring place, or a silly...