Word: vision
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 Scholastics or passionately by the mystical school of love, expanded St. Augustine's idea of the Beatific Vision, the saints' rapturous and direct communion with God. The Renaissance Catholic heaven more resembled an ongoing human-to-human celebration presided over by the Virgin Mary. But Protestant reformers of the 1500s reinstated a vision...
...19th century, however, heaven had hit a sort of ornamented bankruptcy. The stark vision of the Puritans had given way to what would later be called the Victorian heaven. Here was the humanistic heaven with a vengeance, calmly convinced of its own literal truth but with a spiritual core seemingly provided by House & Garden. Its strongest proponents were not clergy but a new breed of popular novelists like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose 1868 The Gates Ajar, set in heaven, was a runaway best seller through the end of the century. Wrote Phelps of one celestial interlude: "We stopped before...
...more liberal 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...
...Such a vision, expressed so unabashedly by a bona fide member of the academic elite, stands to make a splash in the upmarket reaches of academia, theology and perhaps even among mainline Protestant preachers. In the meantime, however, a fellow revivalist is stirring up more populist waters. Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic since a diving accident at age 17, is well-known in conservative Protestantism. She appeared on a Billy Graham Crusade, wrote a best-selling autobiography whose royalties she used to found a religious organization to aid the handicapped, and has a radio program airing on 700 stations. Like...
...what I don't know." He's got some fancy tutoring too. Among those who help him brush up on balance-sheet analysis is former Walt Disney Co. president Michael Ovitz, a close friend. Adds Lombard: "Earvin is a tremendous businessman. He has the same level of vision that he had on the court and the same control in knowing when to pull the trigger and when...