Is This Heaven?
Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/11/2017
9:00 am - 1:45 pm
Location
Northway Christian Church
Categories
Is This Heaven?: The Afterlife in Literature, Culture, and Scripture
Twelfth Fay and Alfred Grosse Seminar on Religion and the Literary Arts
Saturday, November 11, 9:00 a.m. to 1:45 p.m.
Northway Christian Church, Dallas
Greg Garrett, Professor, Baylor University, Waco, TX
Stories of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory are central to an understanding of Christianity, and are, for many, a central part of their faith. Yet, as N. T. Wright notes, the Bible has few explicit descriptions of the afterlife, and many of our afterlife narratives owe more to art, culture, and literature than to the Gospels or the Revelation to John. Writer, teacher, and retreat leader Greg Garrett will explore our central stories of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, offering some of the best-known cultural depictions of the afterlife and comparing them to their treatment in scripture. In the process, he will offer some answers to the questions “Why do we need these stories?” and “How do we use them?” What Greg argues is that these stories of the afterlife enlighten and inspire us to live more fully in the here and now.
Greg Garrett is the author of over twenty books of fiction, spiritual autobiography, and nonfiction, and a major contributor to the contemporary-language Bible The Voice. Hailed by BBC Radio as one of America’s most important voices on religion and culture, he is best known as a writer on the intersection between faith and literature, movies, television, and cultural narratives. His Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, was a lead trade title from Oxford University Press in 2015. Greg is Professor of English at Baylor University and Writer in Residence at the Seminary of the Southwest, and he regularly speaks, teaches, preaches, and leads retreats across the US and Europe. He has been interviewed by or seen his work reviewed in National Public Radio, FOX News, BBC Radio, USA Today, New York Times, National Review, New Statesman, and Christianity Today. Greg and his wife Jeanie live with their children in Austin, TX.
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