Word: catholicism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dame who has skirmished on occasion with the Vatican but whose theological and historical grasp few would question, believes that before the Vatican II reforms of the mid-1960s, his church had slipped into the lazy role of using heaven and hell as "stories meant to encourage and frighten." Catholicism's once vivid otherworldliness had devolved into a sort of rote board game, in which preoccupation with involved scenarios of the life to come became an excuse to measure out one's life in Hail Marys and First Fridays while ignoring real moral concerns. Not only did this baroque stasis...
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...
In the 1988 social survey Heaven: A History, Colleen McDannell and Bernard Lang observe that over two millenniums human conceptions of heaven tended to alternate between God-centered visions and more humanist arrangements focused primarily on the reunion and interactions of the sainted dead. Medieval heaven, approached intellectually by the...
By 1988, McDannell and Lang concluded their survey with the bleak assessment that "scientific, philosophical and theological skepticism has nullified the modern heaven and replaced it with teachings that are minimalist, meager and dry." Many scholars, especially conservatives, are inclined to agree. Kreeft, the Everything You Wanted to Know author...
Then two things happened. He underwent psychotherapy and a course of the antidepressant Prozac. And his Italian publisher asked him whether he would be interested in writing a volume on heaven. Russell, who belongs to both Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches, notes that up until then, heaven "had been real...