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 »
The reason that Farrow, McClymond, Pakaluk and others cannot address the real argument in That All Shall Be Saved is that they are incapable of answering it. 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 »
Sohrab Ahmari correctly identifies many of the pathologies haunting liberal order in the West (“The New American Right,” October), which some on the right have been reluctant to acknowledge. Indeed, more conservatives should be challenging the fragile premises of the . . . . 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 »
David Bentley Hart, familiar to readers of these pages as an intellectual pugilist who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has entered the ring for the Big Fight. Armed with his recent translation of the New Testament, he is ready to prove that no one suffers eternal . . . . Continue Reading »
The doctrine of hell is coming under particular pressure at the moment. Continue Reading »
Pope Francis allegedly declared recently that there is no such thing as Hell—only the annihilation of souls. Continue Reading »
I have a problem with hell that goes beyond squeamishness. The problem is one of inserting the damned into God’s endgame, his final fix—creation brought to its triumphant completion. Doesn’t the presence of everlasting torment put a damper on the success story? I went to Aquinas for . . . . Continue Reading »
For those (like me) who grew up in conservative evangelical culture, Chick Tracts are instantly recognizable: the dark, apocalyptic artwork; the obscure human caricatures that somehow resemble everybody and nobody. And, of course, the fire-and-brimstone. Continue Reading »
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